


Kohelet 4:11 (Small Apartments)

by LinearA



Series: Ketuvim [2]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: AU of an AU, Books, Dirty Talk, F/M, Jewish Character, Jewish Holidays, Mildly Dubious Consent, Overworked Public Defenders, Recipes, Rough Sex, Senior Citizen Sex, Under-negotiated Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2019-12-06 19:17:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 23,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18224333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinearA/pseuds/LinearA
Summary: A collection of drabbles and cut-scenes set during and after Kohelet 3:16.  Some previously published to Tumblr, some new.(When two lie together they are warm, but how can he who is alone be warm?)





	1. Light Your Lights Where Everyone Can See (G, Chanukah)

**Author's Note:**

> As these are non-linear, I'll put the separate ratings in the chapter titles. When they're set during an existing chapter in Kohelet 3:16, I'll link to that chapter for context. Many thanks to [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique), [TheOnlyCoffeeIsStrongCoffee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOnlyCoffeeIsStrongCoffee/pseuds/TheOnlyCoffeeIsStrongCoffee), [UhmIDon't](https://uhmidont.tumblr.com/), and others, for the prompts and encouragement.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Poe comes to the Bronx for the fourth night of Chanukah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set just before Chapter 4: [Chai/The Best Arguer in New York City.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15677019/chapters/36722658)

The first time Poe came to their apartment, it was Rey who opened the door. Poe held out a tupperware full of blue-and-white frosted cookies. “Happy Chanukah! Pareve, if you care.”

"We don’t; we’re too lazy and hungry to keep kosher,” Rey assured him. “But thank you! Happy Chanukah; come in!” She gestured with her head to where Finn and Rose were standing at the stove, gesticulating as the hot oil popped around the latkes. “The argument is already in progress.”

“Oooh,” Poe said, “what are we arguing about?”

“He’s siding with Christopher Hitchens,” Rose said in disgust. “Christopher Hitchens in  _Slate_.”

Poe frowned. “Isn’t Hitchens dead?”

“Yes,” said Finn in exasperation, “he is, and I’m not  _siding_  with him, I’m making a point with which he happens — “

"You liked the link when that guy put it in Paige’s thread.”

“Again, just because it happens to support  _my_  point, which is that celebrating the Maccabees is celebrating religious fundamentalism! They were  _priests_ ; they started a war because they were mad that other Jews were partaking of Greek culture — ”

” _Colonial_  culture, is the point; the Seleucid Greeks were occupiers; they were  _literally_  imperialist, Finn — ”

“I mean technically,” Rey broke in, as Rose paused to flip a latke, “we’re not celebrating the Maccabees, right? We’re celebrating the miracle of the oil.”

“Which is  _obviously_  a flimsy post-hoc justification for celebrating a military victory,” Finn said.

“An  _anti-colonial_  military victory, against incredible odds,” Rose corrected, stubbornly.

“But I mean even if it is,” Poe said, “I’d say it’s pretty evidently what keeps the holiday around, that it’s a holiday of light in a dark time of the year, like Christmas and Deewali. It’s cold; the sun sets before five; we need a reason to drink and eat fried potatoes with sour cream.”

“Yeah, Finn,” Rey teased, “why do you hate latkes?”

“I don’t hate latkes! I love latkes.”

“Give it just a sec and we can eat the first round. But anyway it’s a holiday about asserting our survival,” Rose maintained. “That’s why you put the menorah in the window where everyone can see. ‘Look, we’re still here. They came to colonize us, but we were not erased.’”

“Oh,” said Rey, “I thought we put the menorah in the window because we’re sharing the light.” At Rose’s gesture, she offered up a paper-towel-covered plate, onto which Rose flipped three latkes, still sizzling, golden in the middle and brown at their lacy edges.

“I like that,” said Poe thoughtfully. “I was at a protest the other day where we used a line from Leviticus.” He sang, a pleasant, soulful tenor that made Rey feel obscurely welcome, ushered into some warm circle by the sound of his voice: “ _Aish tamid tukad al hamitzbeyah; lo tikbeh, lo tikbeh._ 'The fire on the altar must be kept burning; it shall not go out.’”

“'Keep hope alive?’” Finn said, in the half-grumbling tone that Rey knew meant his cynicism wasn’t very sincere.

“I mean, I thought of it less as hope than like… the will to care? The inner fire to repair the world. The passion for justice.”

“I like hope,” Rey put in.

“Me too,” Rose said cheerfully. “I just like mine flavored with grim determination to keep going no matter what. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum and all.”

“Well, let’s get this candle-lighting show on the road, anyway.” Finn gestured to the little brass drugstore menorah where it sat on the windowsill, half full of candles for the fourth night, the shamas listing a little to the side. (Rey wasn’t worried; they’d melt it into place once it was lit.) “Rose, we good to go on latkes?”

“Yep,” Rose said, flipping another set of fried potatoes onto the platter. “Next time, by the way, a male person is going to be in charge of frying things in hot oil. For equity reasons.”

They drew in a little half-circle around the menorah, and Finn offered Rey the matchbook. “You light, we’ll sing?”

“Sure,” Rey said. “But have we established yet whether we’re saying 'share our light’ our 'fuck you, we’re still here’?”

“It can’t be both?” Poe smiled, with a shrug of his shoulders.

“It can definitely be both,” Rose said.

“Both it is,” said Rey, and lit a match.


	2. Home Cooking (G, Recipe)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey's recipe for pumpkin pasta and Overturned Siberian Sleigh Rides. (Like regular Siberian Sleigh Rides, but cheap.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As seen in Chapter 9: [Oneg Shabbat II/Fancy-Schmancy Orange Juice.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15677019/chapters/37402181)

_Rey's Notes: All ingredients can be obtained without leaving 231st St! The vodka is cheaper if you go down on 204 by the Dyckman House, though._

**Pumpkin Pasta**   
_Based on a much fancier recipe from the NYT. Feeds 3, well._

 **2 boxes of pasta, ideally tubes, or spirals  
** **1 can pureed pumpkin**  
 **2 TB butter**  
 **1 scant TB red pepper flakes**  
 **salt and pepper**  
 **pinch of sugar**  
 **2 pinches of nutmeg, if you have it**

1\. Buy the pasta at the Pioneer when it's on sale (2 boxes/$1). Pumpkin is on sale sometimes after Christmas and Thanksgiving.  
2\. Go to the Dale Diner. Order toast with extra butter. Eat the toast for breakfast; take the butter. If you're short on sugar, take a packet of that, too.  
Grab a handful of mints on your way out. (Next recipe.)  
3\. Go to Broadway Pizza and Pasta. Make conversation with José and take a takeaway cup of red pepper.  
4\. Cook pasta in boiling water. While the pasta is cooking, melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. When it's melted, add the pumpkin and red pepper and some salt and pepper and about 1/2 cup water. Mix and cook until the pumpkin is sauce-y and dark. (You can always add more water if you need it.)  
5\. Turn heat to very low and mix in sugar and nutmeg (if you have it).  
6\. Drain the pasta (keep some of the water if your sauce is looking dry).  
7\. Put pasta in sauce. Mix and serve!

**Overturned Siberian Sleigh Rides**   
_Gets 3 very drunk._

 **Like 3/4 of a litre of vodka? More or less. This is a follow-your-heart recipe.  
** **4-5 diner mints**  
 **Chocolate syrup**  
 **1/4 gallon milk**

1\. Put about 4 fingers of the vodka in a drinking glass with the diner mints and let them dissolve.  
2\. Put about 4 fingers of the vodka in another drinking glass with another finger of chocolate syrup and stir to mix. Stir the mint vodka too.  
3\. Combine all. Stir well.  
4\. L'chaim!


	3. Dead Trees and Living Hearts (G, Books)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey gets tired of stalking Nazis online and looks at Ben's books instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during Chapter 17: [Doykeit/New York v. Polansky,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15677019/chapters/38779391) when Rey is staying with Ben. Originally posted to Tumblr.

When she can’t take it anymore, she does go into the bedroom and read his books.  She scans for the most dog-eared, tattered, water-damaged book she can find, because she wants to know what he likes best. Tolkien, is her first guess, and at first she thinks she might be right, because he actually has two copies of  _The Lord of the Rings_ , an immaculate box set and a trio of garish paperbacks.  But as she starts to tip them off the shelf, she sees next to them the mass-market copy of  _Speak, Memory_ , opened so often the spine is almost unreadable, and as she reaches for that, she sees that the book beside it,  _The Once and Future King_ , is so battered it’s actually held together with a rubber band; she hesitates, because she doesn’t want to mess with it if it’s actually falling apart.  So she reads  _Speak, Memory_ , bemusedly absorbing the alien and beautiful details of an aristocratic Russian childhood until he comes home and finds her there, in front of his shelves.  Then she taps the rubber-banded book.  "Your favorite?“

"Sort of,” he mumbles.  "I mean.“  He clears his throat.  "Those are my comfort books.  That shelf.  That’s why they’re so easy to get to.”  And it’s true that this shelf must be just below shoulder height for him, everything on it easily grasped, and there’s only the one row, instead of the two-deep shelving everywhere else.

“Comfort books?”

“Books you re-read when you’re sad.  When you need to feel… soothed, or consoled.”

She holds up the Nabokov she’s been reading.  "This man who thinks he’s too good for sleep is consoling?“

He blushes.  "It’s good prose.”

She supposes it is, at that.  "Does that mean you have uncomfortable favorites, too?“

He rests his hand on another shelf, higher up, in a different case, and she peers at it.   _Collected Poems, Philip Larkin.  La peste.  Blindness. The Last Samurai.  Autobiography of Red._   

She marks them with her eyes, and asks him about his Hebrew books, and their sharp-edged, scholarly English companions, hardbacks from university presses with plain covers and colons in their titles.  She recognizes a few from Rabbi Luke’s shelves.

In Rey’s experience, people’s books, particularly their favorite books, form patterns, and the patterns say things.  Finn’s books ( _The Power Broker_ and  _The Origins of Totalitarianism_ and _The Complete Sherlock Holmes_ ) say, like a calm doctor,  _What happened here?_ And Rose’s books ( _Anne of Green Gables_ and  _Fingersmith_ and  _A Wizard of Earthsea)_ say,  _It can be better than this; I know it can._ And Poe’s books ( _Capital_ and  _This Bridge Called My Back_ and possibly every title Haymarket and Verso ever published) say,  _It will be better; we will make it better; but how?_

Ben’s books say,  _It will all go wrong, and I will be alone when it does._

As she skims through his favorites, comfortable and uncomfortable, she finds societies collapsing like dominoes. Kingdoms fall, plagues turn civilization into anarchy.  And she finds lonely, brilliant little boys, often ugly, often sick.  And she finds only one mark, in all the books; he does not write in his books (though it seems he sometimes throws them across the room or leaves them outside in the weather), but one stanza of poetry, with its leading line, is gently underlined in pencil.  

_Isolate rather this element_  
_That spreads through other lives like a tree_  
_And sways them on in a sort of sense_  
_And say why it never worked for me._  
_Something to do with violence_  
_A long way back, and wrong rewards,_  
_And arrogant eternity._

The poem is called "Love Again.”  

She wants to ask him what the wrong rewards are, or were.  What makes eternity arrogant?  She is not a big reader of poetry herself; her own books ( _Island of the Blue Dolphins_  and  _White Fang_  and  _Miss Rumphius_ ), she thinks, say  _Out of my way and let me fix it,_  a message few poets seem interested in.  But he comes home and his eyes are so anxious; she just puts her arms around him, and sways with him, back and forth.

“You’re like a tree,” she tells him.  “A big warm tree.”

“Cut me down,” he says, smiling at her “and turn me into paper.”


	4. You Know I Can Take Whatever I Want (E, Handcuffs/Rough Sex)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From a prompt: "In Chapter 17, Ben says 'When I call you those things, I don’t mean it; I just say them because you – ' to Rey and she puts a hand to his mouth and he thinks it's as much about 'keep him from asking how much of what she says to him she means.' as it is about quieting/calming him. I'd just love more of that--a scene from the time Rey is staying with Ben before Poe's trial where Ben says (and does!) more of the hair-pulling and/or wrist/ hand capture/holds and accompanying very dark take on himself as a member of the nypd that both he and Rey (and readers like me!) enjoy from Rey’s pov or from Ben (if Ben, bonus added minor angst over his enjoyment of it would be fantastic!)"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set, as noted, during Chapter 17: [Doykeit/New York v. Polansky.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15677019/chapters/38779391)
> 
> **Content warning:** Everything that happens here is consensual, but as in most of the story, the kink is under-negotiated; some of this borders closely on role-played rape.

 

He wouldn’t do it if she didn’t ask him. He absolutely would not.

She asks in unpunctuated uncapitalized emails that he doesn’t dare open on his desktop at work.

_well whats the point of being a dirty cop with ur blackmail victim under ur thumb if u dont use her huh_

He understands. They both have the same hungry, senseless plea for one another:  _Hurt me, scare me, tie me to a chair; do whatever you want with me, so I can know I’m wanted._ Rey asks, and he does it. He’s only being a good… whatever he is to her.

Except Ben isn’t sure that justifies how close to hard he is when he’s not even in his own building yet. He fumbles with his keys and pleads with the forces of judgement in his head.  _But she asked, and you should see her; who could refuse a girl like that anything?_

It’s bullshit; the more-than-half-hard-on in his pants says so as he goes up the stairs. He’s a monster. But that’s what she wants.

Rey told him she doesn’t think he’s a cop, not really – but –

Maybe this is her way of punishing him, for not quitting.

When he makes it through his apartment door she’s folding her laptop away. The super’s heated the building based on the forecast and not the actual temperature, and it’s hot as hell. All she’s wearing is a summer casual shirt of his, light and loosely-woven. She hasn’t even buttoned it up.

He turns away to hang up his overcoat and take off his shoes and suit jacket. When he turns back she’s standing in front of him, lower lip out, eyes bold and just, _just_ alittle afraid and he should not like this so much.

“You stole that shirt,” he says, and yanks it off of her. “Hold out your hands.”

“You can’t arrest me; I didn’t take it off the premises.”

“Hold out your hands.”

“You can’t arrest me for that, you petty shithead creep! Fuck you!” The mouth on that girl. The face. The tits it makes him hungry just to glimpse. _Look at her; look at her; see what I mean? Who could refuse her anything?_ Not him. He grabs her wrist with one hand. It’s narrow but her hands are strong. He reaches back.

“I decide who gets arrested for what.” He won’t follow procedure. Procedure would be to cuff her hands behind her back. But it makes him genuinely queasy, watching the cuff close over that mark on her wrist; he has to be able to see her eyes when he does it. She looks fascinated. Her chest heaves, and his mouth waters. He pushes her towards the bedroom so hard she almost stumbles.

“Go on,” he says. “You don’t want to resist, do you?”

She does; of course she does. He grabs her by her bound wrists and drags her into the bedroom. He half-throws, half-pushes her down, and it made him nauseous to put them on her but fuck it makes him hard to watch her squirming, naked and cuffed on his bed.

He bends down and kisses her. She pushes her fists hard against his chest but she presses her mouth hard against his, too, wine-sweet, tea-sweet, thirsty and open. He shifts his weight onto the bed, and some of it onto her. He runs a savoring hand from her shoulder to her knee, feeling her shiver and strain under his touch, and doesn’t stop kissing her.  _Nobody but me; she doesn’t kiss anybody but me_. His fingers move from her knee to the inside of her thigh and drag through the slippery wetness that’s soaking through her curls, and he groans against her mouth. “Fuck.” He pets her roughly, makes her squirm, and smirks at her when he holds his shining fingers to the light. She scowls back, breathing hard.

He wipes his hand dry roughly on her tits and starts to undress. “Gonna be a good little toy for me?”

“No,” she snarls, wrestling herself half-upright as he gets his shirt and tie off. “I won’t be a good little anything.”

“Of course not,” he says, unfastening his pants. He puts the key to the cuffs on the bedside table and gives his cock a long, slow stroke, wallowing in the filthy sight of her, wet and disheveled and forcibly restrained. Mouth all red from kissing.

He climbs naked onto the bed with her and seizes her by the cuffs. He pushes them up over her head and pins them to the blanket with one hand. Her breasts are always pretty and firm, but like this — fuck, like this they’re like presents, like dessert; he drops his head and bites the soft underside of one as if she were a strawberry.

She shrieks, and he can see the muscles in her arms working but she can’t move him, and his free hand roves her body, groping, stroking, squeezing. He’s depraved, how hot this makes him, holding her helpless like this while he does what he wants, and he isn’t going to stop, not unless she says so. He slaps one breast, watches its small soft woggle.

“No,” he says. “You’re not gonna be a good little anything. ‘Cause you’re bad.” Another slap. She doesn’t even flinch, but she licks her lips. “And you’re nothing.” When he gets a finger inside her, then she bites her lip, then she whines. “You’re nobody. You have no rights.” She’s slippery and tight and when he crooks his finger she twitches. “I can make you do whatever I want.”

“You bastard,” she hisses, grinding her hips. “You pig.”

He knows, now, after two weeks of this deranged, uncertain bliss he’s living in, how to hold his hand, with his thumb on her clit and a finger inside her, so her back arches and her mouth opens and her fists clench. The blanket underneath her is wet and he wants to lean down and lick it, take it between his teeth and suck her taste from the fabric.

He lets go of the cuffs, and pushes one of her knees back, so he can watch his thumb work, his finger thick in her little pink hole. Rey brings her hands to her breastbone, huffing, as he stares. “Fuck,” he breathes, “such a tight little toy. You know I’m gonna hurt you with my big cock.” She whimpers, shifting on the blanket, and his cock twitches.

He wonders if it’s sort of like this, doing Schedule-1s? Knowing you’re doing something awful and bad for you and doing it anyway because it just  _feels so fucking good?_ And he’s not even in her yet.

But she asked him for this. There are things she needs out of it. And he’s going to give them to her.

He throws her over onto her stomach, her hands trapped under her, and wraps her hair around his hand. “Tell me,” he says, and pulls her head back as he gets between her legs. “Tell me why I’m doing this to you, you dirty little nobody.”

“Because you can,” Rey grits. “Because I’m nobody; I’m nothing; nobody sees me. I can’t do anything; I’m  _helpless_ and I’m  _useless._ ” Her voice rises, and thins out.  _“Please_  hurt me; use me; fuck me,  _please_.”

“Yeah,” he mumbles in her ear, letting her hair go so he can hold her steady at her hip as he presses the head of his cock in. She always feels so good. “Yeah, you need your big bad cop, don’t you? To hold you down and take what I want?”

“Yes,” she cries, and he pushes into her.

She moans for him when he does it, a low, wild sound, and she’s so wet and so tight. He shouldn’t like it so much, shouldn’t look down, greedy and gloating, at her narrow back, and say again, “You know I can take whatever I want,” and fuck her harder. But he does. He fucks her brutally, methodically, a cruel procedure like a search-and-seizure, while she whimpers and arches underneath him, and it  _feels so fucking good._ It’s a drug, he could swear it was a drug, to whisper, “Tell me what I’m doing to you, Rey,” and have her sob, “Fucking me. Using me. Bastard.” To chuckle when she twists and fights beneath him and meet her with rough, punishing thrusts that make his breath gutter with pleasure.

He wants it to be a drug, so he doesn’t have to know that it’s only him, drunk on the dark shadow of his own real power.

He can take whatever he wants.

“You like it. You like being fucked by a cop. Handcuffed and used. If I had a nightstick, I bet you’d ask me to use that, too. Should I bring home a nightstick, Rey? So I can fuck you with it?”

“You fucking creep; I fucking hate you.”

He bends down close, bracing himself on his hands.  “I could come inside you,” he whispers to her. “Fuck this tight little pussy till you make me come and just pump it all inside you.” Oh fuck, just the thought – the thought of how it would feel – he brushes her hair back from her face and neck, so he can watch her swallow hard, squirming. Scared. “You couldn’t stop me. Could you, Rey? I mean, what’re you gonna do?” He leans forward again, laughing in her ear. “Call the cops?”

“You asshole  _pig,”_  she growls furiously. “You fucking sadistic pig. You have no fucking soul; all you do is hurt – ”

“Maybe I will. Just ‘cause I want to.” He needs her to come, before he makes himself come, talking about it like this. He takes her hair back in his hand and pulls her taut. “Take my little toy – my helpless little nobody whore, and come in her tight little hole. Bad cops do that, don’t they, Rey?”

“You evil – fucking – bastard,” she sobs, and her fingers clench on the blanket and her pussy clenches down on him, and he thinks it would feel better than anything, better than any drug in the world, to come in her hot, sweet body as she twists and chokes and comes for him. He makes himself pull out, and paints white lashes on her back, groaning, before he falls on the bed beside her.

She pants, beside him. He gropes for the key and unlocks the cuffs. Hazily, he rolls on his side and kisses her shoulder, her upper arm, as she removes them. He turns his head so he doesn’t see her rub the red marks, and licks his way along the stripes he’s made.

He tastes the bleach-ish, egg-white flavor of his come, but also Rey’s sweat-salted skin, the peachy texture of her soft against his tongue. It tastes like  _she lets me come on her back._ It tastes like  _she lets me lick her clean._  It tastes like  _she isn’t going to leave me, not tonight._ He licks and licks and licks.


	5. Misuse of Public Property (E, Phone Sex/Dirty Talk)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey calls Ben at work. Ben jerks off in a cop car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This scene was is my outline for Chapter 17: [Doykeit/New York v. Polansky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15677019/chapters/38779391), and then by the time I got to the place where it should go the chapter was already 4,000 words long and not yet half over, so I reduced it to two lines.

His phone rings, with a 718 number he doesn’t recognize. There’s a 90% chance it’s junk, but the downside of the department paying his phone bill is that he always has to answer the thing. “Hello?" 

"Ben?” asks Rey’s voice, hesitantly. He jumps up, grabbing for his coat. Oh God. Oh God, what’s wrong? 

 "What is it?“ he asks, panicked. And shit, shit, Hux is in the room. Snoke is down the hall. He has to watch what he says. 

"Nothing’s wrong,” she says hurriedly. “It’s not an emergency." 

He slows, still working his arms through the sleeves of the coat. “What is it?” he asks again, trying to sound less frantic, though his heart is still racing. Maybe she just needs to know where he keeps something. 

 “I just — I’ve spent all morning doing this shitty stuff — and it made me cranky and I — I wanted to hear your voice.” 

"You did?" 

"Yeah. I like your voice." 

"You do?” He walks into the hall.  _I’m sorry; I have to go home; I think I have a girlfriend._

“Yeah. I like it when you talk to me.” Her voice gets lower, quiet and husky. “I like the things you say to me. I like the things you say in my ear when you’re fucking me." 

 _An evil girlfriend. A girlfriend who is trying to kill me._  "I am  _at the precinct._ ” It occurs to him that he has not had a landline for several years. “And where are you calling from, anyway?" 

"Payphone,” she says casually. “They’re quite hackable, you know." 

"You’re on the street?” he hisses. 

“It’s quiet.  Will you talk to me?” 

“No,” he says. "I told you. I’m at the precinct.” He doesn’t go back to his desk, though.

“There isn’t a bathroom you could lock yourself in for a little bit? A supply closet?” Her voice has a deep purr in it. They’d been in his bed last night, with him on top, trying to take his time with her, putting a leisurely little swivel in his hips to see if she’d like it. She had seemed to like it; she’d pushed her body against him and dragged her blunt nails slowly up his shoulder blades. And she’d hummed, a long warm  _mmmmm_  with that same purring note.

He’s sure she can hear the way his breathing wavers as he tells her, “No.” The only individual bathroom is the handicapped one, and he doesn’t think either it or any of the closets are as sound-proof as he’d like. All the interrogation rooms have video monitors. “I have…” He still has to be careful about what he says. “Keep talking." 

"I can talk. I called to hear your voice, but I can talk." 

"Yes,” he says, keying open the door to Requisitions. “Do that." 

"I was having this fantasy, earlier,” she says, and she’s pitching her voice just as she does when her mouth is right beside his ear, and he tries not to shiver as he indicates what he needs to the bored man behind the desk with hand gestures. “I was having this fantasy about… what if I never gave you your bed back after you offered it to me? And you were still sleeping on the couch?" 

"I don’t like the sound of that,” he says, frowning as Requisitions brings him a form for a replacement handcuff’s key. You leave one nasty note; you get attitude forever. He writes his request on the form and shoves it back across the desk. 

“I wasn’t done! So maybe I’d start getting kind of… comfortable, in your bed. Start doing things you shouldn’t do in other people’s beds. And maybe you’d catch me at it; come home early and find me naked in your bed with my hand between my legs." 

Ben’s  _so_  grateful for the capacious way his coat’s cut and lined; he can dig his hand into his deep pocket and grab his stiffening cock through the layers of fabric and tuck it under his belt, and it only looks, from the outside, as if he might be a bit chilly. Not like there’s a beautiful woman on his phone making a mess of him. 

"And, oh, you’d be so mad, because how rude, what a bad guest, right? What a bad girl.” Thank God the clerk has his back turned at that moment; he can’t see Ben’s face. “And you’d grab my hand away and maybe if you’d just come home, you’d still be wearing your gloves. So maybe you’d run your fingers over me, just lightly, and then show me what a mess I was making of your gloves, in your bed. All wet." 

He snatches the key out of the man’s hand with the curtest conceivable nod — he’s never going to be popular in this office — and rushes down the hallway, aware that he’s turning redder and redder as she talks. 

"And you’d tell me, you’d tell me to look at what a dirty girl I was, how I was ruining your nice things. Your soft sheets, your leather gloves. Being so bad.” There’s more whisper in her voice now, more tension. She can’t see what she’s doing to him. Officers and staff are walking past him; he tries to walk faster. “You’d push your fingers into my mouth and tell me to clean them, clean the mess I made." 

He chokes. She can hear that; she pauses. It isn’t just the picture of Rey, naked in his bed, with his fingers in her mouth, tasting her own wetness. (Though, God, he can see it vividly, almost feel the mattress give beneath his knee.) It’s that he, too, has dreamed about gloved hands in his mouth. A man, elegant and self-possessed, a cool voice above him as he kneels,  _ah, that’s a good boy; I knew you’d like that._   It’s like double vision, delirium.

He stumbles against the outer door, almost falling into the cool air outside. In his ear, Rey says, softly. "But I am a bad girl. So I wouldn’t do what you tell me. I’d bite. Not hard. Just a little nip. Just so you could feel it. Just to let you know who you’re dealing with." 

He wants it, he wants it so bad; Rey’s sharp little teeth sinking into him, the smell of her on his glove, her gorgeous, defiant face. He can barely read the numbers to match the key to the plates. 

"And you’d grab both my hands, then, and pin them by my head. Undo your belt and take out your cock. ‘Cause it isn’t worth getting undressed, is it? Just to show the little brat in your bed that she can’t just do what she likes.” His hand shakes on the car door handle, fumbling. He’s so hard it hurts. Her voice is like candle wax on his skin. “Just to show her her place. Your little police whore. Ben. I can’t stop thinking about how you called me that. It gets me so wet. Isn’t that bad? How much I like all the filthy things you say to me? How I’m calling you on your lunch break to have you say them to me again?" 

He slams the door behind him. "I go to lunch at one, Rey,” he gasps. “It’s like twelve-fucking-fifteen." 

She gives a small, breathless giggle. "Sorry." 

"Like hell you are,” he growls, unbuckling his belt as he whips his head around to make sure no one followed him. Patrol car back seats have tinted windows, but a cop getting in the back by himself looks weird. Suspicious. He closes his hand around his cock. Oh God. Oh fuck. His hand is cold, but the relief is still so intense he bites his lip. 

“You’re right; I’m not. Can you talk now?" 

"Yes. Are you really on a public fucking street and talking to me like this, Rey?" 

"I told you, it’s quiet. Are you touching yourself?" 

"Yes,” he sighs. “I wish you were too.” A terrible thought occurs to him. He takes his hand off his cock. “Rey. Don’t you fucking dare. No street is that quiet." 

"I could just sit in this crossbar here and — " 

"You’ll get arrested for public lewdness. Tell me you won’t, or I’ll hang up." 

"No, fine,” she sighs. “Talk to me. I’ll just save it up. Go back to your place and work it off in your bed. I’m not waiting for you to get home, though." 

Of course not. He starts to stroke himself again, slowly. "God, you’re so bad,” he groans, and hears her catch her breath. “Tell me, Rey. How do bad girls get fucked?" 

"Hard.” Her voice is barely a whisper. “They get fucked hard, Ben." 

"That’s right,” he tells her. “Don’t care where you are when I get home." 

"Maybe I’ll be on the fire escape, then." 

"You little tease.” Oh, she liked that. And he likes how much she liked it. He tightens his grip. “You filthy little tease. Calling me at work just to make me hard. Telling me your dirty thoughts." 

"Tell me yours,” she asks him. “Do you ever think about me like that?" 

It throws his rhythm off. Is she fucking kidding? Has he thought about anything  _else?_  For months and months and months? "All the fucking time, Rey." 

"Tell me? I wanna think about what you’re thinking about. When I touch myself." 

He’s chafing himself; he spits in his hand. Wishes for her mouth on him. But he can hear her breathing. "How wet you get for me. How tight your little pussy is. The way you ask me for it. Fuck. Like you need it, need me." 

"Do you have fantasies, though? Things we haven’t done?" 

"Sometimes.” He swallows. “It’s kinda bad. And it doesn’t really make sense." 

"Tell me,” she breathes. “Touch yourself and tell me." 

"Fuck,” he grunts. “Fine. Remember when you came and fucked me on the chair? Sucked me off? I came so hard I almost fucking died. But I didn’t get you off and then you… ran off. And I didn’t feel great about it, okay? And I thought about you getting all dressed up for the party, maybe in that dress and those socks.” Dressing up for Poe, he’d thought at the time, but he doesn’t mention that, now. He puts a twist into his stroke, gets himself drunk enough on pleasure to get over the shame. “And I thought, maybe I’ll go to the fucking party. And just grab you. Take you into Poe’s room and yank your panties off and fuck you against the door so everyone can hear exactly how hard I give it to you. Hear you say my name. Hear you come for me.” She’s breathing hard; maybe she’s angry; he’s about to stop when he hears her whimper, just a little, and after that he can’t stop, even if he wanted to. “'Cause you’d like it. You’d put your legs around me and your cunt would be so fucking wet — tight — you’d squeeze me so hard when you came — I’d come so fucking deep inside you, Rey, you’d take it all. I want to do that, Rey; I want to come inside you so bad and I know I can’t but  _fuck, Rey_  — you’d feel so —  _fuck_ — you'd like it — be the best, be the only thing — " 

He comes in his hand, knees hitting the seat in front of him as he arches up. She hears him, and she whimpers again, and she really is going to be the death of him, one way or another. 

He tries to catch his breath. His left hand is full of sticky whiteness. Why does it look so good on Rey’s skin and so unappetizing on his? He reaches for the car’s ticket pad to wipe up the mess, trying not to think too hard about what he’s doing. Or what he’s done. 

"Thank you,” she says softly in his ear. “Come home soon. I miss you." 

He freezes. There’s a soft click, and he looks at his phone. She hung up.  _She can’t miss me; I was just there this morning. She can’t miss me; she was just flirting. She can’t miss me; I’m not the kind of person people miss._

 _But she told me I wasn’t alone._  

He works through his regular lunch hour, head down, following leads he knows are dead. When he clocks out, he tries not to run. 

She’s sitting on the floor with her back against the couch, reading one of his books. "I know what you said you’d do,” she says, as he comes through the door, “but do you want to go to the park, first? Just for a quick walk?" 

"Okay,” he says, because what else would he say? 

He stays by the open door, watching as she puts on her shoes and her coat. When she’s done she takes his arm, and his heart moves abruptly into his throat. “I really did miss you,” she says, shyly, just as if she knew he’d wondered.


	6. Lies About Candy (G, Ben-Rose Bonding)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose calls Ben in Los Angeles with some advice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was intended to be a short vignette in Chapter 18: [Bashert/Next Year.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15677019/chapters/39578188) I couldn't make it work in the chapter so I cut it.

Rey is holding her phone out to him, looking wary.  “Rose says she wants to talk to you.”

Shit.  There are reasonable odds he’s about to get read the riot act.  But he’s a grown man and he probably deserves it, so he takes the phone.  “Hello?”

“Ben?  It’s Rose.”

“Hi, Rose.”

“I need to tell you something about Rey, okay?  Go somewhere where she can’t hear.”

“Okay…” he says, slowly, frowning.  Nowhere in the apartment meets that criterion.  He goes out the door, closing it behind him, and walks around the little… gallery, balcony, whatever it is that all the second-floor apartments in these weird buildings open onto.  “Okay.”

“So,” Rose sighs, as he makes his way down the stairs, “Rey’s favorite candy.  It’s those little, like, tablets, with the syrup inside, that are wrapped up to look like strawberries.”

Ben frowns in surprise.  “The grandma candies?”

“The grandma candies,” Rose confirms.  “She  _loves_  them.  But you can’t just buy them for her, okay?  Because she’ll freak out if you do.  So like… do you have a workplace?”

“Not yet."  It’s a bit of a sore spot — he has applied for some clerkships, while he studies all the dumb propositions this state has inflicted on itself and its lawyers, but currently he doesn’t contribute anything to the household except his ability to open a normal bank account.  Rey, as she brings him her under-the-table pay, claims she’s paying him back for the month she spent in his apartment.

"Hmm.  Or like, a place you go regularly, that she doesn’t go?”

“Sometimes I go to senior homes with Uncle Luke.  A one-man incompetent legal clinic."

"That’s  _perfect._ Though also I'm sorry; is it all like, testate stuff?"

"Yeah, basically.  Sometimes it's statute-of-limitations stuff, which... I don't really like."

"Ugh, are they like, old rapists?"

"Not yet, thank God.  Just old frauds.  Mostly just the testate stuff."

"Okay, so tell her that, like, you helped a nice old lady with her will and she insisted that you take some.  And that way she won’t get mad at you.”

Is there a hint of bitterness, in her tone?  “She got mad at you for buying candy?”

“Yeah,” Rose says.  “For ‘being too nice to her.'  It makes her freak out.”

“Oh.  Yes.  That.  That thing where she thinks she doesn’t deserve anything.”

“I can’t help you with that."  

"I know."  Ben thinks that Rey is helping herself with that.  He hopes.  He thinks that perhaps it’s because she never had anything spare in her life, never had anything but just enough to meet her needs, that she never understood that giving can mean something besides pity.  As she gradually comes to have a little bit more, he thinks she’s coming to see that it can be a pleasure.  An honor.  A privilege.  They won’t get married until she has her visa, and he hopes, by then, that she’ll let him give her a ring.  

"Thank you,” he tells Rose.

“No problem,” she answers.  Another sigh.  “And if you ever have any problems, just… call me, okay?  I’ll email you my number.  We’ll get her through this.”

“We will,” he says, and it isn’t until he hangs up that he realizes how easily he said that  _we._


	7. Tell Me About It (E, Shared Fantasy/Threesomes)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was: "Kohelet bi!Ben fantasising or broaching the topic of a threesome with Rey when they’re all happy and settled in LA." Then there was a request for a follow-up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place after Kohelet 3:16; originally posted to Tumblr. Precinct is a gay bar in Los Angeles, and KCET was the PBS affiliate in SoCal in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s.

“Do you miss dating women? Being with a woman?”

Rey puts her phone down (she promised him she wouldn’t bring it into the bedroom – dirty little liar) and looks up at him. “Where’s this coming from?”

She’s ready for bed, in her underpants and camisole, but she doesn’t look drowsy even a little. Ben feels himself squaring his shoulders under her eyes. “I was just wondering.”

“Is this conversation going to a let’s-put-an-ad-on-Craigslist place, Ben?”

“No,” he says, taking a step back. “I’ve got some self-awareness, Rey.” He walks around to his side of the bed, the thin carpet cool under his feet. “If I actually saw you with somebody else, I would. Uh.” His shoulders hunch a little as he sits. “Probably not handle it well. I dunno. I was just curious.” And maybe a little insecure, a little worried, but she doesn’t need to hear about that. It’s mostly curiosity.

“Do you miss being with men?” she counters. He gives her a faint smile, with a raised eyebrow. She knows how little he’s actually done with men. “Or, okay, the possibility of being with a man? Because I would also be pretty ticked off if I saw my husband with someone else.” His face warms, and he feels his smile deepen. It’s crazy, how much he likes being her husband, how he can’t help smiling whenever she calls him hers. How she knows and says it so he’ll smile. “But are you sad you’re not free to go down to Precinct and take your pick?”

He snorts, eyes on the stucco ceiling. “Men were always mostly fantasy for me. What am I losing if they stay that way?”

He expects her to snort back at him. But she’s quiet. He turns his head; she’s turned on her side towards him, and her face is serious. She’s not looking at him, exactly, and she’s smoothing the blanket between them with her fingers. “Do you… fantasize about men a lot?”

“ _No – no_  – I mean, I – just – I just – ” Fuck fuck fuck this is one of those things, isn’t it? That they warn you about, in marriages and things. And he just hadn’t thought. And now –

“Ben,” she says, and her fingers are smoothing over his shoulder instead of the blanket. “Ben. Breathe. I’m just… ” She undoes the top button of his shirt. “Curious. You know.” Another button. “ _Curious_.”

He does breathe, like she tells him to. Watches how fast his buttons slip free under her fingers, how long she chooses to linger over the last ones. “Curious.”

“Tell me,” she whispers. “I’ll touch you and you tell me.”

It’s hard to swallow, but he manages. “What do you want to know?” Her fingers skim just above his belt, pushing his shirt aside.

“Hmmm… I don’t know.” She brushes his hair out of his eyes. “What was the last fantasy you had about a man? Want to tell me that?”

When her voice is low like that, when her hands are on him like that, careful and gentle and promising to be otherwise – he wants to do whatever she tells him. He tries to think. The last fantasy he had with a man in it. “Uh. Well, speaking of putting ads on Craigslist… ”

“Ohhh,” she teases. “A threesome?”

He squinches his eyes shut. “You asked.”

“I did,” she agrees, and unbuckles his belt. “So tell.”

“But it’s not like, in our apartment, or anything… I always, like… ” He sighs. “Rey, you’re going to make so much fun of me.”

“Maybe I will. But I promise you.” She pulls his belt free of its loops. His chest shudders as he inhales. “That’s not what I’m going to do right now. So talk.”

Rey’s got it down to a science, exactly how slowly she can pull down his zipper and still get that unmistakeable, filthy unzipping sound. “I always think about… I like to imagine this sort of – old-fashioned club setting, I guess? Soft leather arm chairs, and a soft carpet. And this… impossibly elegant man.”

“Yeah?” The nails of her right hand scrape at the fabric of his boxers, scratching his stomach. Ben shuts his eyes, and sees the man. Pale and slender. The half-bored, disdainful way his eye turns to Ben.

“He – he has me on my knees. In just pants. He’s dressed. And you’re.” He licks his lips. Her hand slips down and grasps his cock, skin on skin; he reaches out and grabs her knee, squeezing; he is filthy and they understand one another so well. “You’re naked. In a chair. Watching.” The chair is big and Rey sits in it like a throne, hair all loose around her shoulders, brushing the tops of her breasts. Knees apart. “And he orders me to. To open his pants and get him hard. So I do, or I mean I start, and then he slaps me. Calls me  _boy_. ‘Don’t you know how to do anything, boy.’”

Rey’s breath is hot against his ear, and her hand, which had been stroking gently up and down him, tightens a little. The Rey in his mind is unmoved, observant.

“He’s wearing these – black leather gloves. And he pushes my head back and sticks two of his fingers into my mouth. Makes me suck them.” Rey makes a soft little whimpering sound in his ear. He knows what she’s thinking; she’s thinking about the gloves he wore in New York. And those are dirty thoughts, too, and they make him hotter, make him thrust into her hand a little, but she asked about this fantasy, this particular one, and he’s telling her. “When I do it the way he wants, he says. He says, ‘That’s a good boy. I knew you’d like that.’ And he – he strokes my hair with his other hand while I suck on his fingers. And he says.” Ben swallows. He has no idea if Rey will like this. His voice sinks to hoarse murmur. “‘Don’t you have a pretty little friend? Pretty little tits and a nice little pussy. Does she taste nice, boy?’ And I can’t – I can’t talk, with his fingers in my mouth. So I nod. And he says, ‘Try again, boy,’ and he shoves his cock in my mouth.” Rey grips him harder; his back arches a little and he digs his fingers into her leg. “He – he fucks my mouth. And he talks about – how hot you are, how you’re watching him make me suck his cock, how you’re touching yourself, watching, making the chair all wet and slippery; asks me if it makes me hard, sucking him like this – ” Rey twists her wrist, stroking him, and he breaks off, shuddering, his hips bucking.

“And does it?” she asks in his ear.

“ _Fuck. Yes,_ ” he spits, and then takes his hand off her knee and closes it over hers. She’s going too hard, too fast; he can’t keep going like this. But her hand is smooth, and cool, and he doesn’t want her to take it off him. He presses down, gently, and she seems to understand; she lets her hand go limp inside his, and he works himself with her soft palm and little fingers. Slower, until he comes down a little, and can talk again.

“He – he beckons you over,” he tells her. “And you kneel behind me. Press your breasts against my back. Touch me – not even like this, just over my pants. And I can feel you’ve got your other hand between your legs. And he says – how you left a wet spot on the chair, watching me suck cock, how you’re going to make yourself come and he’s not going to let me touch your cunt but maybe when I’m done sucking him I can lick your fingers clean, how – I’m gonna come, sucking him – ” Ben’s gasping for air, using Rey’s hand roughly – “And he says – ‘G _ood boy; going to make me come; just – like – that – ‘”_

His hand clamps down on hers; she sinks her teeth into his arm, and he comes, all over his chest, her arm – a huge mess, but he’s not going to care, not with that sound Rey is making vibrating in his skin.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she says, after a moment, gasping for air like he is. “Shit.  _When_  were you dreaming this up?”

“In the shower on, uh… like two Saturdays ago?” he says sheepishly.

“Next time you shower, I’m following you in. I’m going to make you narrate.”

“Okay,” he agrees. She’s squirming against him. “I need one now, actually. If you want to come. So to speak.” His cock isn’t going to be up to much for a while, but in real life, there’s no third party to forbid his touching her wherever she wants him to.

Real life is uniquely gratifying sometimes.

 

* * *

 

Six days later, he’s washing the dishes when he hears a terrible wheezing sound behind him and turns to see Rey slumped against the table, prostrate with laughter.

“What’s so funny?”

Breathless, she gasps, “I can’t believe… that your fantasy life… focuses on…  _club chairs.”_

“I’m just — setting the scene,” he says defensively. “Adding tactile details.”

“It’s the bougiest thing I’ve ever heard,” Rey squeaks, still giggling.

“Yeah, well, if you had my dad, you’d find bougie things forbidden and tittilating too.” He returns to the dishes.

“Well,” she says, coming to the counter to show him her best attempt at a straight face, “next time I want to get laid, I’ll be sure to take you to Restoration Hardware.”

“No,” he says, reaching out with a soapy hand, “next time you want to get laid you laugh at me again, and we’ll see what I do to you.”

 

* * *

 

 _Obviously_ she laughs at him again immediately. Pointedly. He grabs the dishtowel and wipes his hands, glaring at her. But like, what, she’s going to look at him standing there being all handsome and not do anything about it, when he basically just invited her to start something? Besides, while she respects that his job is very tiring and sometimes he needs to just sleep, it’s the weekend now and she doesn’t want to wait to start enjoying it.

“Uh-oh,” she says, smiling, as he steps towards her. “What’re you going to do about it?”

His hands dart out, and he’s got her against him, and he’s  _tickling_ her. She shrieks and tries to twist away but he doesn’t let her go.

“No, no,” he says, deep and ironical in her ear. “Keep laughing, keep laughing.”

She’s gasping for breath – “Ben – Ben – stop – Ben – ” – as he steers her into the bedroom, holding her fast and tickling her remorselessly, until he pushes her face-down on the bed and grabs her ass with both his hands.

“ _Fuck,”_  he says, almost reverently. “Such a nice fucking ass.” She wiggles it, in his hands, and he squeezes harder, grunting. “Had it too easy, this fucking ass.”

She starts to protest, point out that it wasn’t that long ago that she had turned, getting out of the shower after an enjoyable afternoon spent riding him, and found finger-marks pressed into it. But she only gets as far as an outraged syllable when his hands are pawing at the button of her jeans, trying to yank them down without properly unzipping them, and she has to fight to keep her balance and help him before he drags her onto the floor by accident. And then, when he has her pants and her underwear at her knees, she waits, breathless, to see if he’s going to use his hand or –

He takes off his belt. Her breathing gets a little harder. Ben has two leather belts, one black, one brown, both about an inch-and-a-half wide and thin as two credit cards together. He’s wearing the black one today. The buckle jangles briefly, then goes silent as he folds it into his palm and wraps the belt around and around his fist. “Gone way too fucking easy on this ass,” he mutters, barely audible, and Rey hears the slow tap-slap-smack of him testing the strength of his blows against his forearm. She shivers.

They have a safeword. It’s one of the most married, domestic things about them, in Rey’s opinion, that she can cry  _stop it_  all she wants and he’ll never pause, but the faintest murmur of  _light_ and he’ll be all held breath and anxious gentleness.

He uses it more. Hardly ever for when she hurts his body – he can take anything, and welcomes almost everything she wants to do to him; she’s seen him off to work with her marks still on his skin even after a night of sleep. But sometimes she pushes too hard at the edges of his insecurity, and he whispers it,  _light._ Sometimes he says it too softly for her to hear, but it doesn’t matter – she can read it in his brown eyes, in his red mouth, in the tension of his broad shoulders. And she stops, and pets him, holds him, tells him everything he needs to hear.

Another thwack of the belt against his arm, and then a pause, and she digs her fingers into the bed and tries not to squirm. And then it cracks across her skin and she rocks forward, sighing. Again, again, again; he doesn’t count, or make her count; he’s an artist in this, not an engineer. “That’s it,” she hears him whisper, “that’s it, all red.” She gulps and loses her struggle not to wriggle, and then there’s another rain of blows, so hard and fast they turn her mind to sweet white noise, blank and pure as snow.

The belt crashes into the wall where Ben throws it, and he’s on her, caressing hungrily with his hands and mouth, kissing and soothing; she feels his teeth scrape lightly across the seam of her right leg, and then his tongue, and then he  _bites,_  and she moans helplessly, pitifully, feeling a wet drop slide down the inside of her thigh, a bare inch from his nose.

He throws her over on her back; she hisses as her reddened skin makes contact with the cotton bedspread, and he presses her knees back until the tenderest parts are away from the fabric. He pulls her hands to her legs to hold them; “Stay,” he orders gruffly, and then bends his face to where she’s soaking for him, drawing her lips apart with his fingers and nuzzling down. She digs her fingers into her thighs, trying to stay still as his tongue skims her and his nose pushes at her clit. He nudges and strokes her with long, gentle licks until she’s panting and whimpering, and then he looks up at her, lips and nose and chin all shining. She tries to buck her hips up to his mouth, but he ignores her.

“If you think my fantasies are so fucking funny,” he says softly, “how about you tell me one of yours?”

She hesitates, letting go of her legs. This seems like a bad idea. Often in her fantasies, she likes to play with the fire of his jealousy, hurt his heart in ways she’d rather die than do in real life. She can’t imagine a way to tell him so that won’t be unacceptably painful. Won’t he even be hurt to think that she might think of someone else at all? But then he’d imagined his fantasy man eyeing her –

He misunderstands her silence. “It doesn’t have to be about a woman, if you’d rather not tell me that.”

It shifts her thinking just enough that she comes up with something that she thinks might work. “I’ll tell you something. But you can’t laugh at me now. Only later. Okay?”

“Okay,” he says, and stoops to give her one little lick.

“So,” she says, and takes a breath. “If you want my equivalent of your fixation on fancy chairs.” He snorts against her thigh, but she supposes it doesn’t technically count as a laugh, and anyway, he’s moving his fingers softly over her outer lips, stroking the short hair, working his way gradually back to the sensitive heart of her. “Sometimes when I was young, but like after I’d caught up to my grade level, I’d watch TV sometimes on Saturdays. And there was one show on KCET, a BBC thing. And there was this one scene with this woman. In a corset. Dark silk. Shiny. White lace at the top. These thin stripes.” She draws the stripes on her body, to show him. His dark eyes follow the track of her fingers over her skin, and the deep, hard lick he gives her feels ravenous, makes her arch her back. “And I thought – I want a corset like that. And I’d dream about – running my fingers up the seams.” She shows him, again, as he laps and laps, tracing the imagined lines from her hips to the tops of her breasts. “And I’d think about – slipping my hand – in the top of a corset someone else’d wear – how it’d pinch – my fingers – her breasts – tight and hot and – probably slippery – with sweat. But I’d find her nipples – and I’d – pinch – and she’d – whimper – ”

Her hands are at her own breasts, toying, and Ben’s breath is hard and hot; he shifts his mouth to suck her clit between his lips, and presses a thick finger into her. He rubs at her sweet spot as he suckles, and she writhes, tightening her grip on her hardening little nipples.

“And I’d imagine – dressing her in the corset – dragging on the – strings – making her gasp and – bend over for me – while I licked her neck – and she’d – slap me – call me names – put her hand between my legs and – ”

“Like this, Rey?” he says, rubbing her clit in warm, narrow little circles with his thumb. “You dream about her making you come like this?”

“Yes,” she gasps, “please, Ben; don’t stop; just like that – ” and he rubs her frantically, staring at her, licking his wet lips as she convulses, and she’s barely done coming before he’s pressing his dripping fingers into her mouth, pushing his cock hard against her hip as she sucks his fingers clean.

“ _Fuck,”_ he groans into her ear,  _“fuck_ ; I beat your pretty ass so red. Yeah – suck my fingers nicely;  _fuck_ you come so sweet _,”_  and he groans a long low wordless note as he comes across her stomach.

He pops his fingers out of her mouth, but his hand stays, limp and heavy, across her mouth. She kisses his palm and he strokes her cheek with tiny little movements of his fingertips.

After a moment, he says, “That wasn’t fair.”

“Why not?”

“You’re going to keep laughing at me for the furniture of my fantasy for-fucking-ever, aren’t you? But I can’t laugh at you for liking  _corsets.”_   He kisses her collar bone and her blushing nipple, and licks a drop of his come from the underside of her breast. “Do you still want a corset?”

“No,” she says. “It’d just make me feel bad about the size of my tits.”

“You’d look amazing.”

“You just say that because you’re my husband and you have to.” And he smiles as he always does, to be her husband, but for weeks and weeks he shows her pictures, with a hopeful look, from corset-makers in the LA area.


	8. 418 Felony Cases Annually (T, Public Defense)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben speaks to a client as a public defender in California.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set after the end of Kohelet 3:16.

They always ask. He supposes he would too, in their place — if the court assigned him a lawyer who looked like him. He can't tell them the details — "My informant thought I was threatening her, and she cut me with my own handcuffs" — because why should they trust him if he's a cop? "My wife did it" — it's true, but a lot of his clients have DV in their backgrounds and he's an insensitive asshole but he's not _that much_ of an insensitive asshole. He tried "I got in a fight" with a few people, because he thought it might reassure them, knowing that their lawyer is a fighter. But they were warier, more uncomfortable afterwards; one asked if he could have another lawyer. They want Atticus Finch, not a bar brawler. He's also tried lying, claiming there was an accident, but he can't ask his clients to be honest with him if he isn't honest with them. 

His client is younger than he is, somewhere in his twenties. White, poor enough to need a public defender, with a chin-weed for a beard. The charge is Health and Safety, possession to sell — oxycodone. His client has no prescription. And the stuff in the evidence bag is subdivided into smaller bags. If the guy doesn't have anything to explain it, Ben's going to have to advise him to try to plead out, which the DA is going to be unwilling to give much on. Ben's asked him what the stuff was doing in his car, and all he's gotten is this guy staring at his face with his bloodshot blue eyes. So he waits. For an answer to his question, or for the inevitable: where'd you get that?

He doesn't get either. "You Jewish?"

Ben frowns. But his business cards say Benjamin Kanata-Organa now, and he doesn't lie to his clients. "Yes."

"So you'll get me out of this, right?"

Ben takes off his glasses. (He has to wear glasses now. He doesn't know if it's age or stress or too much time with small print.) But he's got nothing to clean them with and they don't actually need cleaning, so he puts them back on. 

If his client notices his discomfort, there's no sign. "Like, you know who to talk to."

He could tell this guy that Jews are somewhat disproportionately represented in law but do not, in fact, make better lawyers. That the idea that they do is based on the stereotype of Jews as canny, devious, and unscrupulous. That the idea that he "knows who to talk to" implies corruption, a cabal, a shadowy, extrajudicial network. That even if he means it as a compliment, even if he thinks he's praising Ben's intelligence, it's still an unjustified and dehumanizing generalization that can only do anyone harm. That not everybody with a big nose is a Jew anyway. 

But he has twelve minutes for this interview.

"The person I need to talk to is you," he says. "I can't guarantee you acquittal; no defense attorney can. But if you talk to me honestly, I'll do everything I can to help you. You have attorney-client privilege when you talk to me; you can tell me anything, and I won't tell anyone unless you agree that I should. So. The bag that was found in your car."

The guy fidgets, bouncing his knee and looking away. "How'd you get your face fucked up like that?"

Ben takes a breath, and tries a new answer. "I made a mistake, and I did some things I shouldn't have. I paid for it." He rubs the scar with his hand. Thinks of Rey with snow in her hair and fire in her eyes. Rey with whiskey on her breath and fingers that don't quite touch his skin. Rey's hand on his cheek with the blessed cold indent of her wedding ring. "I got off easy, considering." 

"You got off easy, so maybe I will too, huh?"

"Maybe. So. The oxycodone. It was found in your car?"

"Yeah." His client looks up at the fluorescent light. He looks wrung out, sallow and exhausted.

"Do you know how it got there?"

The guy's eyes turn down to the floor, to the peeling linoleum tiles. He sighs. "I put it there."

"Okay," says Ben. "Okay."

Ten minutes. He has ten minutes. He can make it work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The titular statistic comes from Fresno, rather than from Los Angeles County, but it's also perhaps a little unlikely that Ben would immediately be hired as a PD in a competitive city, given his lack of lawyering experience; he may be practicing in San Bernadino, where the caseload seems to be between 350-400. (The ABA recommends a case load of no more than 150 annually per public defender.) Louisiana is particularly bad about this; you may have seen [the recent piece in the NYT.](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-defender-case-loads.html)
> 
> Also, free advice for arrested people from my best friend, who is a public defender, and who I would dedicate this to if he would ever forgive me for it: "Never trust a cop, and all prosecutors are cops."


	9. Menschkeyt/Ten Years (E, Public Defense)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben has a bad day in court. Inspired in part by [TourmalineGreen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TourmalineGreen/pseuds/TourmalineGreen) and [BazineApologist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BazineApologist/pseuds/BazineApologist), who know that public defenders are good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Menschkeyt** — (Yiddish) The quality of being a mensch (a good man, a good person); the ethos of right conduct.

Rey is annoyed, but not very. It would have been nice if this messaging app were the grail, the end-to-end encrypted, iOS-and-Android-compatible, untraceable, quick-wipe system of everyone’s dreams. But of course there’s a hole in it. An NSA-request-shaped backdoor. She knew when she went looking that it would be there. She messages Jannah:

_o this ones been talking to lew 4 sure_  
_u kno the deal_

Jannah does know the deal; she won’t have sent or asked for anything sensitive. Jannah’s conscientious; Jannah knew Anna Politkovskaya, briefly; she knows what can go wrong. She puts her phone, and her sources’ phones, in the freezer while she interviews them. She doesn’t promise anything she can’t deliver, and she won’t deliver any of her sources into Putin’s hands. Rey looks forward to the article. She packs her laptop and heads for the bus stop on Wilshire.

When she gets home, she knows what’s up even before she open the door; she feels the thump of it. Maybe soon they’ll move to a bigger place where Rey won’t feel her husband’s quick, stamping steps in the kitchen from where she stands on the doorstep. But Rey likes this place, which has everything she’d ever dreamed of as luxury as a child: a gate that buzzes to let people in, unrusted iron bannisters, and a swimming pool in the center courtyard. More even than the place she likes having a bank account, watching savings accumulate as the two of them make more money than they spend on rent and groceries. She’s never had that before, and Ben doesn’t mind indulging her frugality for a little while.

But for better or for worse, it does mean she can feel him pacing, as she fits her key into the lock. She knows he can hear her coming in, but he doesn’t stop his frantic, furious steps, and he doesn’t wait for her to finish crossing the living room and come into the kitchen before he spits it out. “Ten years. Ten _fucking_ years.”

She drops her shoulder bag. “Ben. I’m sorry.”

“They do this shit because they _can._ You know that?” She knows. She’s heard it before, every time he’s lost. It hurts. But it hits him hard and it comes spilling out of him in rapid streams of bile. His voice is raw and there are tears in his eyes. “Because they’re fucking sadists and it gives them _satisfaction_ to lock people up for as long as they can. And the stupid law is fucking stupid, and they know it; crack is _identical_ to powder, but rich people snort and poor people smoke and so they can ask for _ten fucking years_ in jail for this stupid kid who’s doing less damage to anybody than a dumbass rich kid at USC doing lines at a party.” 

He stops to draw a shuddering breath. “I know,” Rey says. “It’s horrible. It’s unjust.”

“And the fucking jury – do they know they’re ruining his fucking life? Over eleven ounces of unseparated crack they have _no evidence_ he was going to fucking deal? Except that of course the prosecutor shows he _went to school_ with someone who got an intent to sell conviction so obviously he moves in _criminal circles_ and I showed them them the stats that say there were literally a thousand kids in his freshman class but _he’s_ going on about bad atmospheres and — ”

He breaks off, seizing the edge of the sink and ducking his head in as if he might vomit. She walks over to him and lays her hand gently on his back, and he reaches abruptly up and jerks the faucet on, pouring cold water over his head. She feels him exhale, long and shaky, and the thin slow breath that refills his lungs. All the muscles in his back are tense. She runs her hand slowly back and forth, and further and further up his shoulders. She closes her hand around the back of his neck with a little squeeze. He sighs. She works her fingers into his hair, letting the cold water find a quicker path to his scalp, scratching him lightly with her short nails, and he sighs again, longer and slower.

“You did your best,” she says. “You tried your hardest.”

“I swore,” he says, hoarsely, under the running tap. “I said ‘fuck’ in court.”

She knows that’s not the real problem. She keeps running her fingers through his hair, stroking through the wet locks, and she presses herself against him, not tightly, not crowding him, just so he knows she’s there. “That’s probably worse for you than for your client.”

“It wasn’t good for him.”

“Maybe not. But you know you’re right. What you were saying when I came in. The prosecutors didn’t have to press for the maximum sentence. They didn’t have to prosecute him for intention to sell. They didn’t have to press charges at all.”

“I know that.”

“It’s like — it’s like — ” She casts about for a metaphor. “It’s like they tied him to the tracks, and there’s a train coming. And you are trying to untangle the knots, and yelling at the train to stop. You’re a mensch for trying — ” He snorts, and she continues determinedly, “ — and I’m glad you try, but if the train doesn’t stop before you untie him, _that’s not your fault.”_

“It’s my failure.” He keeps his head down, under the stream of water, but he lifts his hands to gesture, pressing his big palms up towards heaven. “It’s my clumsiness. My incompetence.”

“It is _not,”_ she says sharply. “You’re perfectly competent. More than competent. But no one can expect you to stop a train.”

His hands drop, clenching into fists. Worried he’ll punch the enamel and hurt himself, she steps close behind him and puts her own hands over his. She strokes his fists lightly, and his hands slowly open. His head ducks lower. “Somebody still got hit by a train, though.”

“I know.” She leans forward, standing on her toes to hook her chin over his bent shoulder. “I’m upset about it too.”

He trembles underneath her, and for a moment she’s afraid he’ll slip his hands free of hers and punch something anyway. But then he leans his head awkwardly to the side, rubbing it against hers. _Comfort me,_ that soft, doggish rub says. _Love me._

She straightens up, shutting off the tap and gently turns him around. He keeps his eyes downcast, water trickling down his face from his hair and his eyes. Wet spots spread on his collar and his shoulders. “Do you want me to take care of you?”

Sometimes, when he loses a nasty, stupid case like this and she finds him pacing and shouting and hitting things, he wants to hold her down and sink his teeth into her, fuck her so hard she can only gasp as he grunts vicious things into her ears, against her skin. Sometimes he does what he does now: almost crumples against her, his voice aching. “Rachel. Please.”

She wraps her arms around him. “C’mon.”

He walks with her to the bedroom, leaning heavily on her. When they get there, she pats his chest, making him stand upright. “Take off your clothes.”

It’s dim in the bedroom, the lowering light of early evening glowing at the edges of the blinds. He had his jacket and tie off before she got home; it’s not good for his nice shoes for him to toe them off like that, but he does it anyway. She slips off her own shoes, lets her shirt and pants fall to the floor beside his shoes before she takes over unbuttoning his shirt.

“You’re a good lawyer,” she whispers to him as she helps him, as he unbuttons his own pants and lets them drop. “You do good work and I’m proud of you. You try so hard. No matter what happens, no matter what anyone thinks, you do good work.”

“Everything is so fucked up,” he whispers back. “Everything is so bad.”

She slips his shirt off him. It’s not cold, but he shivers. She runs her hands down him, caressing, catching her thumbs in his underwear. “I know. I know.”

“Take off your bra?” he asks her. “Take down your hair?”

“I will.” She slides his underwear down him, so he can step out of it. His cock isn’t hard, but as she sweeps her fingers gently over him she feels him stirring. “Go lie down.”

He does. His eyes, big and dark and shining, watch her closely as she stands beside the bed, stripping herself, and as she climbs over him, straddling him. She sits at his waist, rubbing herself a little, settling in, just below his navel. She leans forward, stroking his wet hair back, running the pads of her fingers over his eyebrows, down his nose. When his eyes close, she kisses him, softly, leaning against him so he can feel her breasts, so her hair brushes his face.

“I know how hard you work. How hard you try.” She kisses him again, tracing around his ear and down his jaw. “People need you. They need help. You give them help. They’d be so alone without you. But you’re there, so they’re not.” She grips his shoulders gently, rubbing, runs her hands down the length of his arms to slide her fingers into his palms, where his fingers close over them. “And you’re not alone. I know how bad it is. I’m here.”

“Rey,” he murmurs, and she brushes her lips over his collarbone.

“It’s bad, but I’m here for you. Like you’re here for me. Aren’t you?”

“Yes. Always.”

“Good lawyer. Good husband. Good man.” She rolls her hips a little as he shakes his head. “You take care of me. Give me what I need.” She kisses his neck, the underside of his jaw, open-mouthed, tasting. “You let me take care of you, too.”

She runs her tongue down his breastbone, sliding her hips back. He’s hard now; she can feel him against her backside, and she wriggles, teasingly, as she curls her tongue around his nipple and feels him twitch. She thumbs the nipple she’s wet, indents the aureole lightly with her nail, licks again, and sucks until he whimpers.

She knows he’s self-conscious about the slight softness at his middle, so she doesn’t kiss him there as she slides further down, just keeps rolling his nipple lightly between her fingers as she lifts her hips and slides further still, until she can kiss his hip and his thigh, and lean her cheek lightly against his cock, before she kisses that, too.

He sighs as she takes it in her fist to lick under the head, and puts her mouth over him. A long sigh, that rises and falls with her head, before his hands come softly down to grasp her hair. He sweeps it this way and that as she bobs her head, pulling it up to fall across his stomach, blanketing as much of himself as he can with her. She sucks one ball into her mouth, and he sinks his fingers into the dense tangle of curls at the back of her neck, a broken sound rising from the back of his throat. “Rey,” he rasps, as she sucks on the other, “Rey, you know I don’t deserve you.”

She lifts her head. “Nobody deserves anybody, Ben,” she says sharply. She pouts against the hard length of him, letting him feel the soft wet inside of her lip, before she returns to sucking him, her hand stroking gently in concert with her mouth.

“But you can _not_ deserve somebody.”

She looks up again. “Ben. Am I not doing a good job with this or something?”

He tilts his head, unsmiling. “Maybe it’s my evil plot to get you to fuck me so you have your mouth free to argue.”

“You could just ask, you know.”

“I mean, only if you want to.”

She works him slowly with her fist. “I’m not going to fuck you and argue with you about whether you ‘deserve’ to be fucking me.”

“It’s not just the sex — ”

“Ben. Shut up. You don’t fight me like this when you win, do you?”

He doesn’t. When he wins – even if it’s just a good plea deal, or a sentence reduced to time served – he texts her right away, all the details. He buys wine, or takeout, or they eat dhosas while he hooks his foot around her ankle under the table and smirks when she licks her fingers clean. He picks her up and presses her against the wall; he tumbles into the bed with her and eats her like watermelon in summer, fucks her, panting endearments and curses. You’d think he was the one getting out of jail, sometimes.

“No,” he admits. “But — ”

“So don’t fight me now. Lie back. And shut. Up.”

He obeys. She meant this to be soothing, but now she thinks maybe she ought to be a little firmer with him, if he’s going to be self-flagellating like this. She sucks him hard, bringing him back to where he’d been when he interrupted her. She draws her head back a little, putting a twist into the stroke of her hand and scraping her tongue back and forth over a spot that makes him hiss and groan. She’s going to break this stupid lawyer into pieces and put him back together, and she shoots him a look to tell him so. He’s staring at her, stricken, hands reaching out, curved to the shape of her head without actually touching her. She speeds up. His hips writhe, his back arches. She tastes more and more salt on her tongue, and he paws at her hair like a kitten with wool. She presses her fingers gently around his testicles, and up, squeezing just a little, and growls in the back of her throat, and he almost yells as he comes, warm and explosive in her mouth, her lips and her hands wringing him dry. It’s a lot, hard to swallow, so she doesn’t try too hard; she lets a little trickle of white run from her lips as she sits up, making sure he’s watching as she licks her lips.

He lies limp, looking up at her with stunned eyes. She lies down next to him, digging one arm between his back and the blanket, and kisses the corner of his mouth. With one fingertip, she traces his silhouette, forehead, nose, lips, shin. He lifts a hand and moves her hand to trace the scar down the side of his face instead.

And here they are, at the heart of the problem. To Ben, that scar represents every mistake he ever made, his sins written into his flesh. When she sees him looking absently into the reflective surface of the kitchen window at night, drawing and re-drawing it, he is listing in his head every abuse of power, every brutality he ever looked away from, every way in which he was ever compliant with an unjust system. When he wins, when he slips someone free of that system’s grasp, he’s paying his debt. When he loses — another mark against him. Another sign he deserves to be marked.

The worst is when he loses because a cop lies in court. Those days there’s nothing to do but hold him.

“I know,” she says. “I know you think it’s not enough.” He looks at her. The light in the room has sunk with the sun; his eyes shine black and lost in the darkness. “You think, whatever you do, it’s not enough.” Not enough to pay his debt. Not enough to fix the broken world. “But if what you’re doing isn’t enough, then nothing is.”

“Maybe nothing is.” His words come thickly, through a closed throat, and he tries to hide his face in the pillow. He’s so afraid. Who isn’t? It feels like evil rains down on the world every day, every moment, more than he or she or anyone can hope to push back or protect anyone from. They’re carrying bodega umbrellas, law, cryptography, in a hurricane of cruelty and ruin.

“Maybe. Maybe nothing is enough. But Ben.” She presses her whole hand against his face, cradling him, turning him to face her. “Even if what we’re doing is not enough, it’s _something._ And we are doing it together. And we will not stop.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Talking to Lew Giles" is a cryptography euphemism for "deliberately weakening your code at the request of the NSA."
> 
> [Anna Politkovskaya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya) was a Russian journalist and human rights activist who reported and wrote extensively on Chechnya and the human rights abuses which occurred there, and on the secrecy and corruption of Putin's government. She was [assassinated in the elevator of her apartment building in 2006,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Anna_Politkovskaya) carrying groceries home.
> 
> Many if not most states continue to punish drug offenses involving crack more harshly than the same offenses involving powdered cocaine.


	10. Milk and Honey (E, Unprotected Sex)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey gets an IUD. Ben tries not to fall to pieces. (With, as usual, middling-to-moderate success.)
> 
> (Happy kinktober, the author says, at 1AM Eastern on October 31.)

Because he is himself (which is to say, a moron, an absolute fucking idiot), they get into a fight about it. Because it hurts her. He knows he couldn’t hide the way his eyes lit up when she mentioned getting an IUD; however much he pretended to be calm and rational, however often he let her know (too often, too often for her to believe him) that it was her body and her choice and she should do what she thought best, he knows he couldn’t hide how much he wanted her to do it. And she did it, and now she’s sitting in the passenger seat looking white as a ghost and wincing whenever they go over a bump. He’s asked her three times already if there’s anything he can do; the first time she mumbled something about a heating pad when they get home, but the next two times she just shook her head, which clearly means she doesn’t think he can do anything for her. He tries again.

“Can I do anything? Like right now?”

She just shakes her head. Her eyes are closed. So she’s in pain, and he can’t help, and it’s all his fault, because he let her know how much he wanted it and it put pressure on her, and now she hates him and she’s going to leave him, like all her friends probably think she should anyway, and go off and be happy somewhere else, and he’ll be alone in their sad apartment, completely alone, and he can feel the misery of it washing over him as he looks at Rey’s pale face and it’s not fair.

“You know, it’s not like I held you to this at gunpoint,” he snaps.

“What?” she says, half-mumbling.

“This was your choice.” He can see it now: himself standing helplessly over her as she lies in bed, hurting; the follow-up appointments from which he’ll fetch her with increasing dread and anxiousness while she turns her face away from him; her sighing a resigned acquiescence to his first timid advance, and the chilly sex that follows; her rolling away from him in bed; her reminding him of his promise that she _can_ leave him; his phone call to his mother on his lunch break, begging her to intercede, and her sigh, her reminder that he brought this on himself by pressuring Rey – 

“I know that,” Rey says. She sounds irritated. She’s mad at him, but this wasn’t his idea. Even if he really, really wanted it. Why did she have to think of this?

“I just don’t think it’s fair,” he says, and his knuckles are white on the wheel, “for you to be mad at me about this when it was your idea to begin with, and I would have been fine with it if you decided not to.”

“Who says I’m mad at you?”

“You’re not exactly beaming at me,” he mutters.

“My body thinks it’s bleeding internally, Ben; I’m not beaming at fucking anything.”

His throat closes. _Bleeding internally?_ He has to fix this. “We’re going back to the doctor’s.” He cuts across lanes, heading for the offramp, wishing for a siren.

“What? No. It’s normal.”

_“Normal?”_

“Just let it go; I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

Tomorrow? She can’t wait until _tomorrow._ He pounds his fist sideways against the window, like he wants to be let out. “That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s how it is.”

“No, that’s absurd. That can’t be right. Birth control isn’t supposed to make you feel like you’re dying.”

“Which one of us sat through the lecture from the doctor?” Her. Though he’d have gone in if she asked, which she hadn’t. “Believe me. It’s fine.”

It’s clearly not fine. She’s _in pain._ And traffic is slow. He can’t even get her home. “Fuck this traffic.” She could have tried the pill, instead. Except that that keeps you dependent on insurance, and maybe makes you depressed. They could just go on like they have been, with condoms and pulling out; he doesn’t _really_ mind. “Fuck LA and fucking LA traffic.”

“Oh, yeah, being on a delayed train, packed up against a stranger like a sardine would definitely be better right now.”

“I’d have gotten you a taxi,” he protests. In the back of a cab, she could at least lie down; she could put her head in his lap, maybe; he could stroke her hair.

“Manhattan traffic is not better than this traffic.”

“Yes it is.”

“No it’s not.”

The car hits a pothole and she grunts. He should have been paying attention. He’s a bad driver, a bad husband, a bad person. Rey knows it. She’s been holding out hope that he’d get better, but no, here he is, a stupid asshole doing everything wrong while she’s in pain. He slams both fists against the wheel and screams through his teeth.

“Ben, what the fuck is _wrong with you?”_

What’s wrong with him? What’s _wrong_ with him? “Why don’t you tell me, Rey?”

“Well,” she says acidly, “to the untrained eye you appear to be freaking the fuck out because I said a heating pad might be nice.”

 _“No!_ What? No!”

“I _know_ it’s my fault I hurt like this; I knew it would hurt.” She wipes her nose. Is she crying? “I’ll be fine in a bit. I just have to wait it out. I’m trying.”

He swallows hard. She’s trying to be stoic. Trying to hide how much pain she’s in. Which means she’s in a lot of pain. But she’s trying to spare him. Keep him calm, or happy – oh fuck, does she think he’s _angry with her_ for being in pain? That’s exactly the sort of awful thing she could have learned as a kid, and exactly the sort of awful thing he’s given her a dozen reasons to expect from him.

“Rey,” he says unsteadily, reaching out hesitantly, afraid to touch her in case she doesn’t want him to. “Rey. Shaina maidel. I didn’t mean – Rey, it’s just fucking _killing_ me to see you hurting, and I – Rey, if I made you feel – pressured, or like you had to do this – ”

She wraps her fist around his thumb, and he can feel his heart in his chest, squeezed like a lime at a bar. “Ben. It’s fine. I just need a nap. I wanted this. For myself. Before I even met you.” Out of the corner of his eye, he can see her working to smile. His whole chest hurts. “Birth control Mike Pence can’t take away? This is my early Chanukah gift to myself.”

He nods, and exhales. Tries to be calm. “Okay. So. Heating pad. I can get that at the pharmacy, yeah? Do you want me to pick it up before or after I take you home?”

“Before. Thank you, Ben,” she whispers, and tugs a little on his thumb. He can’t believe she stays married to him.

He gets her a heating pad, and ice cream, because pregnant women in books and movies always want ice cream and maybe it’s a uterus thing? And also Rey likes ice cream, especially when it comes in a screw-top jar she can reuse. When he gets her set up on the couch with the pad and a blanket and the ice cream, she insists on feeding him a spoonful, and he gets down on his knees to accept it. And kiss her. And keep kissing her, until the ice cream starts to melt, his hand over hers on the jar.

The IUD takes a month to become fully effective, and of course they have sex before then. The feeling of the stiff strings poking into his latex-wrapped cock is a bit of a shock the first time, but it does absolutely nothing to diminish the excitement with which he looks forward to the end of the month. When he fingers her, he imagines she’s sticky with his come; when he licks her, he imagines it’s dripping from her. He mumbles about it under his breath while she sucks him.

Rey has gamely tried to understand his enthusiasm. _Because you can’t?_ was the first thing she said, and that was sort of true. He’s been having sex with Rey for a little under a year, and they are legally married (though, as a cold voice reminds him at night sometimes, not _really_ married; she hasn’t signed a ketubah) and in all that time he hasn’t been able to come inside her without a condom. The self-restraint this has required has felt superhuman sometimes, or tortuous; he tries to explain to her that he mostly just wants the physical feeling of it.

Rey had looked at him, and her face had gone soft and bright. _You worry, don’t you?_ Yes, of course he worries. If he screws it up, she’s the one who’ll suffer for it. He knows where the nearest pharmacy that stocks Plan B is; he pictures the neon glow of its lights sometimes, when it feels too good and he worries he’ll lose it. After this, he won’t have to worry.

But there’s more to it than that. As the month goes on he starts to get, not to put too fine a point on it, obsessed. In the last week, the internet history on his phone becomes a solid wall of porn searches, each more sordidly specific than the last. And then, the day before the wait is over, it gets approximately a thousand times worse, because he says something joking about it, and Rey points out that she’s actually never had a man come inside her before.

It is a fucking miracle of self-mastery that he files two very solid motions that day. And also brings home dinner. And eats it, without trying to fuck her on the table first. If he stares at her the whole time, well, sue him, and anyway by the end of the meal she’s licking her fingers at him.

He’s about to take this as an invitation to have her on the counter, maybe, (anywhere, he’ll fuck her literally anywhere; he’s proved it) when she abruptly drops her hands into her lap. “How do you want to do this?” She bites her lip. “Like, is there a way you’ve been imagining it. Or something.”

His dark and stupid heart, which has been burning for 24 hours with the idea of being _first,_ the first man to come in her cunt, whispers, _she was saving this for you. Make it special for her, make it a present, everything she wants, so she’ll want it over and over and over._

He goes to her chair and puts his hand on her shoulder, lowers his head to whisper in her ear, tell her he wants to do it however she wants it. Then her hand covers his, firm. “Whatever you want out of this,” she says, “I want to feel you enjoying it. Not worrying about me.”

He just stands there for a minute. Because he doesn’t know how to do that, not worry about her; he’s not even sure that’s a meaningful string of words.

“Just tell me what you want,” she says. “I know you want me to like it. What else do you want?” He doesn’t know what to say. She squeezes his wrist and smiles up at him. “Don’t you think I can be good for you if I want to, Ben?”

That wicked smile, that evil fucking grin of hers. She fucks with his head. But she always has, and he’s signed up for a literal lifetime of it, is hungrily waiting for more and more binding ways to sign. _Keep looking at me, Rey; keep smiling at me._

He reaches down and grabs her with both hands around her ribcage, the underwire from her bra cutting into his fingers and her fingers digging into his arms as he picks her up out of the chair.

“I dare you. I fucking dare you to be good.”

“Watch me,” she snarls, twisting under his hands, holding tight to his arms. And he wants to. He tucks her against him and crosses the twenty steps across the living room to the bedroom.

“Take off your clothes,” he says when he puts her down, and the way she looks at him when she does it makes him feel safe and strong. This is how they’ll do this. “Lie down on the bed. Touch yourself for me.”

He takes off his clothes, watches her watch him do it. Her eyes on him and her hand between her legs. She wants to give him what he wants.

“Show me,” he says, naked and kneeling over her on the blanket. “If you’re such a good girl, spread your legs and show me that pretty pussy you’re touching.”

She does, wriggling a little. He’s seen it hundreds of times, keeps a photo in a special file she set up for him on his phone. But it’s still always a little thrill, just to see it, the raw pink slice of it, the way it gets wet for him. He leans in close to watch it happen, watch her squirm when he breathes on her. “Hold still. I want to get a good look at this pussy while it’s still nice and clean.”

“Are you going to get me dirty?” she asks, arch, and he grabs her by the hips and yanks her against his mouth, pushing his tongue into her, savoring the tart salty taste and the way he can tell, with his eyes shut and his mouth buried between her legs, how much she likes it. From the way her muscles roll under his fingers, and the way the blanket drags underneath his chest as she digs her fingers in and closes her fists.

“Be good for me,” he whispers, lifting his mouth, and she twists her hips, chasing him. He loves it, having something she wants. “Be good, and come for me.” He nestles his face back down in the warmth and thinks about how pure she tastes right now, how much like herself, and how she won’t be so pure when he’s done with her.

Rey comes, with held breath and a little shudder. She sighs, and she looks at him, as he drags himself over her slowly, taking one hand and then the other, holding them by her head, and she smiles. He’s doing well.

“See?” she says. “I was good. I did what you said.”

“I know it was a struggle,” he says, kissing her jaw. “It’s hard for you to be good, isn’t it? A bad girl like you.” She shivers and shifts and he kisses her neck. She’s got magic words, soft itchy spots where she likes to feel him scratch. He knows; he itches, too. “You’re such a bad girl, and I like it so much.” Oh, she’s spreading her legs for him, now. He reaches down, brushes his fingers lightly over her. “You’re a bad girl and I’m going to make a mess of you. You know that, right?”

She nods, her eyes fixed on him. “You want to come inside me, Ben?”

“You know I do.” He fits himself against her, and she takes hold of his shoulder, bracing herself. Ready to be fucked hard. She knows what he can do.

The first thrust makes her dig her nails in. He looks down at her, her head thrown back, her mouth open, pinned on his cock, and thrusts again. “Gonna fill you up,” he grunts. “Fuck you so full you’ll be dripping for days.” 

She squeezes around him. Does she like that? Fuck, she’s so tight it’s like he has to fight to pull back so he can thrust again. It feels so good, and the knowledge that he doesn’t have to be afraid of what his pleasure could do to her is so sweet. “Such a nice fucking cunt. And you like it when I fuck you, don’t you.”

“I love it,” she says, and her knees come up to squeeze his waist. He’s still got one of her hands, pinned to the mattress, his grip white-knuckle. He’s so deep inside her. She likes it. She wants him. She’s never let anybody come inside her, but he gets to. _And then,_ says his stupid heart, with its stupid wish for magic, _then I’ll be inside her, and she’ll love me; she’ll have to love me best._

He shifts his hips, trying to get the right angle, and she makes beautiful, guttural sounds. He imagines his come running slowly out of her like cream, imagines her out in the world, without him, with his come inside her, dripping into her panties, a drop of it sliding down her leg, reminding her of him, of being here under him like this, trembling and coming the way he can make her come, because he knows her, he understands her – and she’s so soft and slick and tight – “Tell me you want it,” he gasps. 

“Please,” she says, groaning, and he’s going to pass out, or go blind, or lose his mind. “Come inside me, Ben, please come for me.” And he’s pouring everything he’s got into her, and her jaw drops, a little surprised whimper on her lips, and his own voice aches in his chest, _take it, take it all._

His soul comes back into his body when she pushes on his shoulder and he realizes he must be crushing her. He shifts, moving his weight to the bed, keeping his head against her shoulder. Her fingers brush his hair from his forehead and he sighs, sliding down her body. He wants to look at it, her pretty pussy full of his come. He’s about to ask her to squeeze for him, so he can see it drip, when she does it unprompted, and he touches his fingers to it like the little miracle it is.

“In a better world,” he says, “I’d quit my job and just do this all day.”

“The whole thing, or just this part here?”

“All of it.”

“Sounds nice,” she sighs.

“Fucking paradise.” She’s all sticky. The bed is wet. He’s really married to her. He loves it.

“Unfortunately, we both have work tomorrow.”

“I know.” He does. He should let her up, let her wash so she doesn’t get a UTI. He shouldn’t make this more than it is, a confluence of life circumstances and insurance policy. But he can’t help it. “You love me, don’t you, Rey?”

“I do.”


	11. Release Date 2020 (E, Han/Leia)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was (in request to a response for porn prompts): "Han comes home from prison, and he and Leia celebrate."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set after the end of Kohelet 3:16. The prompt came on Tumblr, but I am posting it here.

His son has a court date in California the day he’s released, so Han can’t blame him for not being there, not if it keeps some other schlub out of jail. “Thumb your nose at the DA for me,” Han has instructed him, and of course Ben wouldn’t, but he might win, and make them gnash their teeth a little, and that’s not nothing. And Leah tells him that he and Rey will be there on the weekend, with Luke, and they’ll have what she promises him will be a very small party. And he hasn’t seen Luke for what, years now, and Rey’s a nice kid, and they’re all there on the screen of Leah’s phone, Rey and Luke waving and smiling, and Benny waving and looking like a kicked dog. Han tried not to raise his kid to be a guilt-stricken bastard but oh well.

Chuey hugs him fit to crush him, and offers them a car ride home. But Han’s a member of the public again, and he’s going to ride public transportation, use one of those damn MetroCards (tokens, everything’s been downhill since they got rid of tokens) and sit with his girl on the bus and just be a _person_ in the city. 

It’s a long ride, a bus and two trains, but he doesn’t mind, even though they changed the Queens trains again. The trains move him, and no one stops him, or tells him what to do. The air is full of a thousand smells, a thousand things they don't allow in Rikers. And Leah’s under his arm, clutching his shirtfront with one determined little fist. 

"Missed me, eh, sweetheart?" She glares at him, but he smiles back, and after a minute she tucks her head against his shoulder with a little _hmmph_ noise. Yeah, she missed him. 

Not as much as he missed her, though. With nothing to do but re-read his old favorites ( _Reform or Revolution_ is kind of falling apart), he’s spent a lot of time staring at nothing, imagining what she’s up to at that moment, in the world that was going on without him. Reading, most likely, or talking on the phone, or outlining a case. _Take a break, Leah,_ he's wanted to tell her, the conjured image of his girl. _You'll get a headache if you don't rest your eyes._ But he never knew; that might have been the day she decided to go for a walk. _Leah, take an umbrella. I can smell rain. You know you get cranky when the rain makes your hair frizz, Princess. Always in such a rush, Leah. Where are you going, anyway, Leah, in such a hurry? Leah, wait; I'll come with you. I need some cough drops or something._

_Leah, wait._

She did wait, though.

The young guys thought he was pretty funny, a crusty old yid like him, in for the first time in his sixties. _Got an old lady on the outside, huh?_ they'd ask him. 

_Yeah, I got a girl._ If they seemed like good kids sometimes he'd show them his pictures. He had three — Leah in '92, with her hair in a high braid and her neat white suit, leaning against the door frame; Leah in '04, hair in a crown, smiling in Central Park with her coat collar up; Leah in '82, lying on the bed, her hair all down around her and Ben's curly head resting on her stomach.

He looks down at her grey head now, still armored with her braids, and rests his chin on her. He's ready to get to the apartment, but he's so glad to be home.

It's the gentlemanly thing to do to let her up the stairs first, but he does it for the reason he's always done it; to drop six steps behind and admire her ass. A tuchus like that, you don't see every day, especially where he's been. He keeps his hands to himself, on the stairs at least, because if the neighbors catch him feeling her up he'll never hear the end of it. But once they're through the door he doesn't feel a lot of compunction about making himself comfortable with her against the wall.

She shoves at his chest and he frowns down at her, disappointed. He's home from jail; she wants to do what, have tea? Not that he doesn't miss good tea, and real food, and his chair, and maybe it would be nice, to sit quietly for a moment and let his body remember where it is and isn't. But he's made himself some promises, the kind everyone makes inside. So he pushes back a little bit, and gets a kiss. A real one. They're just like he remembered them, Leah's kisses. Including the bit where he's not done kissing her but she's moved on to grumbling at him.

"Your _knees,_ Han; your _elbows._ I'm not having you get out of jail just to have to take you to the hospital — for God's sake, the bedroom's right there — "

He kisses her again so she doesn't get any ideas that she can boss him around but his old bones are siding with her, and anyway he missed that bed, too, so he graciously allows her to take him to the bedroom, keeping his arm around her waist. 

He wouldn't have blamed her if she'd found some other guy while he was inside, he really wouldn't have. He doesn't own her; she's a free woman, and a beautiful woman, and she's got needs, and he's been gone. And she doesn't have to tell him about it; he isn't going to ask. But when she shuts the door behind them, and everything smells like her, just her, he thinks for a minute he might cry. She waited for him.

"You know I made myself some promises," he says into her hair. "About what I was gonna do when I got out."

"Were they all about whiskey, or only most?"

"Oh, I'll show you what they were about, Princess," he says, and she pulls his head down so she can kiss him, and he walks her backwards to the bed, because she can give him shit if she wants but they both know that they both know better.

When they get to the bed, he turns them around, so that he's sitting on it, her big soft bed, and he has her between his knees. "It's so good to be home," he says, and starts getting her clothes off.

"Han," she says, and he's not sure if she's protesting or what, but she doesn't stop him. Her hands reach out and stroke his hair and thank the Holy Name (in whom he definitely does not believe!) that at least he kept his hair.

He rubs his face against her breastbone, runs his hands over her arms, down her sides, over her ass and back up again. Up her back to her shoulders. He's trying to take his time without taking forever, because that's not what he promised himself, go home to Leah and just drool on her like the old pervert he is. But it's hard, dammit. 

(He's not. He knew he wouldn't be; he's planned for that.)

He remembers the ways she used to like to be touched, and hopes she still likes them. His thumb above her collarbone, rubbing that spot at the edge of her neck. Are his hands shaking? If he keeps moving them maybe she won't notice.

"Han," she says, "Han, I got older."

He looks up at her face. "You? Don't talk nonsense. I — I got old." And it's true. He did. There are no muscles left in him now, only bone and cord and wrinkled skin. But he won't give up the ghost; the ghost is in his chest, hungry and ranting and rattling his cage. And the ghost would not have loved Leah less if she had not waited, but the ghost would not have let him die without seeing her again like this. With him. He pushes his face against her body again, and breathes her in, and hopes she didn't see his lips tremble.

(He knows where Benny gets the crying; it's not from Leah.)

"A fellow goes to prison," he says, to distract her, to keep himself on track, "he thinks about his girl a lot. Been thinking about you a lot, Princess. Do a favor to an old ex-con and get on the bed." He tugs on her hips, gets her to move. Her skin is so soft. He made himself so many promises.

She's on the bed, and he's putting a pillow under her tuchus when she says, "Aren't you going to take your clothes off?"

He makes himself busy with the pillow. "You don't want to see that."

She slaps his shoulder. "Oh, you think you can tell me what I want, is that it? You've been gone for _years_ and you think I don't want to see you?"

"You don't," he says. "Trust me, Leah; you don't."

She frowns at him, sitting up. "You take off your clothes, or I'm putting mine back on."

Dammit. "Years of the damn jumpsuits, I just got my own clothes back, and you want me to take them off?" He knows she's not joking, though. "Fine, fine. Whatever the princess commands." He can see her scowl from the corner of his eye as he starts unbuttoning his shirt. He looks away; he doesn't want to see her face when she sees him. The wreck of him.

"Han," his princess says when he's naked.

"I know, I know," he grumbles. "You don't have to tell _me_ about it." He has eyes; he knows what he looks like. A droopy old dog doesn't need much eyes to see anyway. "And," he adds, when he hears her take a breath to talk, "I don't want to hear any of your _oh Han your knees_ nonsense, okay? You leave my knees to me."

He finally risks a glance at her face. Her lips are pressed tightly together, but her eyes are soft. She holds out her arms to him. Her skin is spotted with pigment; he wants to kiss her all over. "Come here."

He goes. He always has, sooner or later, when it's her doing the telling. And anyway she's holding her face the way she does when she wants to be kissed, and he certainly promised himself that. Maybe his knees do ache a little, on the bed, but she doesn't have to know, and he's gonna make himself real comfortable real soon.

He kisses her mouth, and her nose, and her chin, and the hollow of her throat; he presses her down as gently as he can and kisses her breasts. "You know I missed these, for sure," he says, so she'll potsch him on the shoulder again, and he can snort instead of crying. If they're a little lower than they were the last time he saw her, who can tell? He's been gone so long. She's beautiful; he missed her. Her belly is soft, and he nuzzles it, kissing, remembering all the different ways he's seen this part of her — hollow and soft when she was young, hard and full when she was pregnant, then differently hollow after that, full of soft folds. Always Leah, though. Every kiss he gives her is a promise he made himself, but he could kiss her all night and not have one for every promise. By the time he makes it to her thighs, though, she's saying his name, and he likes that.

"Knew you missed me," he says, before he gets to the best part. It's a little less fuzzy than he remembered — so much the better for him.

"You shkotz," she gasps as he commences licking, "you missed all the hot flashes, everything. Just like you to run out on the hard part." Oh, she's trying to grumble, but she's got her hands in his hair, too, and thank God again he's got it, for her to pet and pull and rub between her fingers. Hell, he missed this; he promised himself this so many times. _Just get through this, you lousy bastard, Han Solo, you son of a bitch, you dumb lucky schmuck; just get through this and you can go back home and lick Leah 'til she moans your name._ And now he gets to luxuriate not just in Leah and her hands and her smell and her taste and her voice, but in the satisfaction of having been right. He made it. He did it. He's here.

He remembers her coming quietly, with her hand over her mouth and low sounds slipping out, but today, this afternoon, she keeps both hands in his hair, clutching him hard and crying out loud. When the cry dies down and she's panting, he pulls himself up next to her. She reaches down his body, bless her, always trying to do the right thing, but his soft little putz isn't up to much today. Maybe another time. He takes her searching hand in his and kisses it. "So tell me, Princess" he says. "Did you miss me?"

"You know," she says, rolling over to bury her head in his chest. "You know I did."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The remaining chapter is for a prompt for an AU of this AU: "Ben Solo never becomes estranged from his family, so he’s a very troubled, intense scholar dealing with his attraction to his rival’s activist protege Rey." I'm working on it!


	12. Curriculum Vitae (AU of an AU)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was: Ben Solo never becomes estranged from his family, so he’s a very troubled, intense scholar dealing with his attraction to his rival’s activist protege Rey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Curriculum Vitae** — (Latin) Course of life. In American English, used to refer to a comprehensive record of an individual's achievements, particularly in academic life.
> 
> Serious spoilers for the main story in this one! For context: This story takes place in May, 2017. Since Ben, in this version, never became a police officer, Han is at liberty, Rey was never arrested, Poe never antagonized Snoke more than any other activist, and generally rather calmer lives are being lead.
> 
> For [Bombastique.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/pseuds/Bombastique)

Ben is not in a mood to go to his mother's dinner party. Rutgers rejected his course proposal and is trying to dump another Remedial Writing section on him. He has the grades still to enter for thirty-two students before the end of May. Fordham is late with his paycheck. His latest paper was rejected, again. Which may have something to do with the fact that, as his therapist has forced him to admit, although technically he'd titled it "A Husband Fit for Torah: Rabbinical Ventriloquism of Women's Sexual Choice in Ketubot and Gittim, Eastern and Central Europe, 1550-1700," a much more accurate subtitle would have been, "Rachel Niemand Should Stop Paying So Much Attention to Danny Polansky and Pay Attention to Me Instead."

So he tried to convert his obsessive thinking on the subject of what one particular woman might want in a partner into a more general line of academic inquiry; is that so wrong? It's an interesting topic. Except that, according to the rejection, his particular exploration is "largely speculative, with few points of genuine data on relevant topics."

Maybe that's why he's going to the party, even though he's not in the mood, because _speculation_ suggests that a _relevant_ girl might be there. With her enragingly adorable, earnest clique, all of them trailing behind Danny — Ben isn't going to call him Poe; he's just not — and chirping away passionately about "street action" and "moral emergencies."

He's so _very much_ not in the mood.

Also it’s raining.

"So I come running up," Danny is saying as he comes in, "like, 'Oh, I'm so sorry, I just put her leash down for a second, I'm so sorry she's bothering you' and I grab Baby by her collar, right, drag her away, and I see she's got a mouthful of something, like she's making those little mnyam-mnyam noises, and the guy's fucking furious, he's shouting in my face, like, _your fucking dog got in my car and ruined my papers!_ Only guess what they were?" He chuckles into his wine glass. Everyone looks enthralled. There’s no sign of Rey. Ben should never have come; he should just have gone home. "My brilliant furball chewed through a whole fucking stack of eviction notices!"

Everyone laughs. Rose claps. Ben takes a breath, and hangs up his raincoat. _Oh hi Mom and Dad, sorry to interrupt. It's me, your actual son. Just dropped by in hopes of seeing a girl who doesn’t want to see me. She’s not here so I might just go back out into the rain and see if you notice? If literally anyone notices? Or I could walk in and spill Danny's wine down his shirt; that might be satisfying._

"Ben, that you?" his father calls.

"Who else?" Maybe he can pretend to be sick. Maybe he'll actually _make_ himself sick if he just stares at Danny and his activist-chic beard for long enough.

"Well, we're expecting Rey, but I guess she doesn't have keys. So you're right; I should have known it would be you. Come in; your mother's put wine and some kind of fancy-schmancy snacks in the kitchen."

"They're just samosas, Han."

"Samosas have, what, peas? Curry potatoes? These have... gorgonzola or something."

"There's a fine line between fusion cuisine and cultural appropriation," Danny says, and Ben would _absolutely_ leave rather than hear him hold forth on this, but his father said they were expecting Rey so he's already in the kitchen, pouring himself an extremely generous glass of Malbec. According to the label on the box, the samosas are goat cheese, fig, and honey. _Transparent reference to the divine promise of Eretz Yisroel,_ his brain tells him, in his own voice, the tight, dry one he uses when he's lecturing. The one he hates, and can't stop using. _Milk and honey, obviously, and figs, one of the seven species._ He puts a samosa in his mouth. It manages to be dry and soggy at the same time. _Disappointing. Yeah, well, that's the promised land for you._

“I think only people who have degrees and call themselves _restauranteurs_ are allowed to call it ‘fusion cuisine;’ if the noodle shop on the corner does it, it’s just ‘inauthentic,’” Rose says, and Ben supports this more complete positional analysis and also the implication that Danny is a snob. He makes sure to nod politely to Rose as he comes to lean against the door jamb.

“Thank you for coming, Benny,” his mother says, and he knows she means it, but he’s also aware that she’s trimming the words with several layers of irony. He wonders if she knows how he feels about Rey. Probably. Probably everyone who has ever seen him in the same room with Rey can see right through to his dirty heart. Probably Rey knows, and if she’s coming it’s only because she didn’t know he’d be here. Probably she’s not coming at all, or she’ll come and then leave with Danny and —

The doorbell rings. “I’ll get it,” he says, because he’s standing up so he might as well, right?

Ben opens the door, wine glass in hand, and is forced to confront the question of whether God loves him or hates him. She’s soaked to the skin. Literally; he can see her skin through her shirt. He can’t _look,_ though; he is an asshole and a creep for the mere glance he’s taken already.

“You’re soaked.” Drops of water are running from her hair down her neck. Individual, countable drops.

“This is why they all think you’re a genius: your powers of observation. I forgot my metrocard; I had to walk.” 

“From 138?” He takes his raincoat off the peg and holds it out to her. 

She gives him a Look. “Bit late for that, don’t you think?”

“I thought you might want to — ” he makes sure to fix his eyes over the top of her head as he says it “ — cover up a bit. So we don’t form any educated opinions about your bra.” Opinions like: it’s a perfectly fine bra, but she should adjust the straps; one is biting into her shoulder and the other is slipping down it. Opinions like: it’s a perfectly fine bra, but if she wanted a nicer one he would buy her one, like the one in the window of that shop on like 80th, with the raised pattern of tiny rosebuds and thorns that look like they would prick at his thumbs. Opinions like: it’s a perfectly fine bra, but he’d like it better if he could just run finger along the upper edge of each cup, with just a little weight behind it, just enough to drag them down and bare her nipples, which might catch at his fingertips too.

She turns scarlet and snatches the coat away from him, huddling underneath. “Shit. Shit. I didn’t even think — ”

He turns away from her. _See? I’m not a complete goon. I’m a mature adult._ “Can we get some dry clothes for Rey?” he calls.

Then there is a flurry of shock and pity and dramatic hand gestures and offers and refusals, which he observes but does not participate in. His therapist has asked him, in several sessions, to consider whether he wants Rey, or whether he wants to be the kind of man he thinks a woman like Rey would want, or whether he wants actually to _be Rey._ Ben agrees that these are worthwhile questions, and he and the therapist have gone over them at length. Rey has many qualities he wishes he had; Rey is brave and lovable in ways he can only dream of being. And maybe he does sort of think that if Rey wanted him, he would be better than he is now, and his having a girlfriend — a pretty, smart, Jewish girlfriend whose politics they like — would probably make his parents much happier than they want to outright admit to their surly, openly-queer-but-perpetually-single son who’s thirty-fucking-five and still an adjunct — though it’s not like Poe’s got a full professorship — Danny, he means —

His father’s hand falls on his shoulder. “What’re you brooding about now, boychik?”

“Academia.”

“Why bother? You know it’s all just corrupt and decadent anyway.”

“I know, Dad; it’s Marxist theory or it’s garbage, right?”

“C’mon, Benny; I didn’t say that. I’m just saying, don’t worry about your _advancement_ or whatever.”

 _In other words: Don’t feel too bad about your failure, son!_ “‘Advancement;’ it’s not an early modern Italian court.”

“Decadence is decadence,” his father shrugs. “What matters is the scholarship, right? Advancing human knowledge and all that.”

He’s trying. Ben will give him that. “Right.” _Right. It’s not that you hate what I’ve done with my life. It’s just that you don’t understand it and you wish I did something else._

As if on fucking cue, here comes Danny to join the conversation. “Benny! Reduced any undergraduates to tears lately?”

“It was just the one. And she deserved it.”

“What the fuck could anyone have done to _deserve_ that?” Rey is frowning, and wearing just an old bathrobe. Which happens to be his.

Ben takes a breath. “I don’t care that they’re wrong. Undergrads are wrong all the time. That’s what instructors are _for_ — to correct ignorance. And if they don’t _listen_ — I don’t like it, but that’s what failing grades are for. But when they misdirect the other students, when they start undermining the _principles which allow anything to be taught_ — why should they be in my class? Why should they be in college at all?”

“The way I heard it,” Poe says, “you were dismissing a student’s lived experience.”

“Their lived experience was not _relevant!_ My courses are in the _Religious Studies department;_ we’re not there to argue about God; we’re there to _study_ what people _have, historically, believed_ about God. I don’t care what her rabbi told her about the legitimacy of same-sex relationships; she can write a book about it! But the question was _what was the halachic consensus_ in the Mediterranean rabbinical community in the 1600s, not _did your present-day rabbi tell you gay relationships are kosher and do you believe that that extends to historical same-sex relationships?”_

“If I were in your class,” Rey says, staring at him, “I would sit in the back row and try to hide.”

“If you were in my class,” he starts, and then stops, because where can he go with that? _I would exist in a state of permanent ethical crisis. I would have a nervous breakdown. I would call on you every session, just to hear your voice and know what you were thinking._ He runs his hand through his hair. Rey’s still staring.

Poe sips some wine thoughtfully. “But don’t you think it’s valid to interrogate the past through the lenses of the present? I think there’s a tendency to let the past off the hook by saying, ‘Oh, they thought about things differently then.’ Isn’t it worthwhile to involve our own moral sense?”

“Do it all you want! In an _ethics_ class. What I study, what I teach, is how _religious thought_ has unfolded. How it develops. How it _changes,_ what different parts of human life it governs or doesn’t. It doesn’t _matter_ whether same-sex relationships are ‘actually’ moral or not — ”

“It might if you’re queer — ”

 _“Not in my class!”_ he roars in Poe’s face. “I’m sure it matters hugely to a painter whether a pigment is the correct shade of blue for their purpose, but if you are _testing the pigment for poison_ it doesn’t matter how much it looks like the sky at sunset! And if I let my students get dragged into the argument of whether or not the color is right for this painting or not, they’ll get it into their heads that _color_ has something to do with _toxicity_ when in fact there is no relationship! None!”

“But don’t you think it’s problematic to shut down avenues of inquiry when they’re relevant to students’ lives?”

“Well, class time is limited,” Finn says, and Ben could weep on his pragmatic, grey-sweatered shoulder.

“But making the student cry?”

“I wasn’t _trying_ to make her cry. But she _would not shut up.”_

“Neither will I,” Poe says with a wink. “And you’ve never made me cry.”

“I am _perfectly_ willing to try.”

Rose and Rey trade looks and Rose begins to giggle. “What is it?” his mother asks. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing!” Rose says, but Ben knows. If he’s spent ten weeks talking with Dr. Yodan about whether he wants to date Rey or be her, he’s spent ten years talking about whether he wants to murder Danny or fuck him.

(He has tried masturbating to the idea of sex with Daniel Polansky more than once, just to see if he could do it, but he has always gotten sad and quit before getting very far. It felt incestuous and narcissistic at once, and Ben doesn’t like feeling either, let alone both.)

“So is there dinner, Mom, or is it just the culturally-appropriative samosas?”

There is dinner, of course, carrot-ginger soup Rose brought in a jar and some zucchini thing his father claims to have found on an anarchist blog, though Ben would put $20 on it just being Smitten Kitchen again. Poe pulls out Rey’s chair for her, and Rey smiles at him, and Ben pours himself more wine. And then Poe prods Ben about the _utility_ of historical analysis of religious thought, and Ben loses his temper again and shouts that if he wants utility, he should take up medicine or waste disposal. But then Rey picks it up.

“Don’t you think, though, that with the world the way it is, that it might be good to focus on something that’s… applicable to the moment?”

He musses up his hair, and then smooths it down, as if that will smooth his mood, or make him less the red-faced, raging foil to Poe’s smooth earnestness. “One, ‘the moment’ won’t last forever. By the time you could make anything other than the most _facile_ analysis of contemporary attitudes, everything will have changed. Moments don’t last. Two, it arguably _is_ applicable. It teaches us how fucking dumb it is — ”

_“Benjamin — ”_

“I’m fucking sorry, Mom! But it’s 20-fucking-17 and profanity is linguistically normalized and I’m trying to make a fucking point! I’m _sorry!”_ He throws his fork down so hard it probably dents the table, and strides back to his room. Just like he always has. 

He lies down on his bed and closes his eyes and breathes from his diaphragm until the urge to scream or break something dies down. When he opens his eyes, Rey’s standing in the doorway, looking at him.

“Hi,” he says, like acting normal will help.

She comes and sits on the floor next to his bed, on the grungy, worn-down Moroccan rug he inherited from his eponym. A man he never met, whose reported wisdom, calm, and grace he has inherited not a shred of.

“Are you really mad that your mother asked you not to swear at the table?”

He sighs. “Mildly.”

“But not, like, fork-throwingly.”

He cringes, covering his face with his hands. He must look so stupid to her. Did his mother ask her to talk to him? He’s opening his mouth to ask when he feels her hands on his wrists, tugging them gently away from his face.

“What are you really mad about, then?” He sighs, and she adds, “If you feel comfortable telling me.”

He shouldn’t feel comfortable telling her. He shouldn’t feel comfortable with her seeing him like this, a big, sad, jealous wreck. But she’s sitting so close. He rolls over on his side, facing her, and they’re almost nose to nose. Her eyes are a shadowy dark hazel; her hair is still wet, and it feels easy and simple to tell her. It feels _good._

“I’m mad that I’m not the person my family wants me to be.”

She lifts her chin a little, like she’s ready to fight somebody. Maybe him. “Who do you think they want you to be?”

“Poe, obviously.”

“Who do you think Poe is?”

Rey sounds genuinely baffled. Ben mutters, “He’s successful. Recognized in his field. He — makes a difference in the world.” He picks at the stitching of his quilt for a second, wondering if, since all this is slipping out of him so easily, he could also manage to tell her something else he might be mad about.

“If you think Poe makes a difference in the world, why don’t you ever come out to our actions? I know he invites you.”

He puts his hand over his eyes again. “Maybe it’s — but that makes me angry too. The thought of being one of his flock. Following behind him. Him, shining in the lead, and me, just… nobody, back in the crowd. And what does one nobody more or less matter?”

“Is that what you think we are? Nobodies?” The pain in her voice makes him drop his hand from his eyes, makes him reach out in shock and dismay.

“No, no — Rey, I — not you. You’re not nobody.” But she shies away from his hand, turning so he can only see the outline of her cheek. Her neck, loosely circled in the black terrycloth of his robe, is thin, and the damp soft hair at the back of it makes his heart clench.

“You speak German,” she says bitterly

He does. It was a requirement for his PhD. He’d asked her, bluntly, tactlessly, the first time he met her, how on earth she came to have a last name that meant _nobody._ What had he been expecting? A quaint Ellis Island story? An anecdote about the inattention of the British to foreign spelling? But instead she’d laid it all flatly out for him: the forced labor at the sewing machine and the labels that gave her a name, the radio that gave her a voice, the poverty and delayed education that have made her an undergraduate sophomore at twenty-six. And he, an idiot until the end, had seen the hand she kept tight around her opposite wrist as she spoke and taken almost two minutes to connect it to the clipping on the fridge, the story of his uncle’s protégée with the shackle-scarred arm.

“That’s not who you are. You can call yourself that if you want to; everyone has a right to pick their own name. But you’re not nobody, Rachel.”

She sniffs. “Luke found them, you know.”

Ben goes up on his elbow. “What?”

“Luke found the man who — I worked for. I’m going to go out to California next month and testify against him so I can get a visa. Your mom said that if I ask for compassionate release he’ll get it; they won’t treat him too badly.”

He does not give a single fucking fuck how they treat that man. Not one. “Rey — Rey, that’s amazing — ”

“But he told Rabbi Luke about my parents. I know their names now. And I don’t want their fucking name. _Plavnik._ I don’t want it.” He hears the thickness in her throat, and he scrambles down off the bed to kneel on the floor beside her. She keeps her eyes downcast, and her lips and her voice tremble. “It’s funny, isn’t it? You’re upset because you think you’re not what your parents want. But I’m _exactly_ what my parents wanted.” She swallows. Ben’s heart is tearing itself in half, a slow, agonizing rip. He sees the effort it takes, to make her voice dry as sand, even as tears spill over her lashes and run down her cheeks. “Disposable collateral.”

“Rey — no, Rey,” he says, helplessly. He wants to clutch her to his chest, to kiss her wet cheeks and stroke her water-sleek hair. “Do you understand, is there anything I can do to make you understand how false that is.” His own vision is blurring, the old familiar haze of rage and weeping. But he makes himself hold still. Makes himself wait to see what she wants. “There is nothing in the wide world less disposable than you.”

Her wet eyes look green, and her fingertips are gentle as they trace across his cheeks. “Are you crying for me, Ben?” He doesn’t see any point in denying it. He nods. “Do you really think your parents want anything more from their son than that he be kind?”

He sobs. He sobs because he’s sure that they do. He sobs because she thinks he’s kind. He sobs because she’s even thinking of him at all, in his soft little life, when her life has been a wasteland in which she has somehow been a rose.

One of her hands is on his shoulder; the other is still on his face. “You shouted at that student because you were afraid, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he says, quavering with the effort of not sobbing again. “I’m so afraid for them. All of them. They’re all so young and stupid, and the world is — how am I supposed to help them? How can anything I do help them? But I’m _trying_ and they’re just — I don’t know how.”

“I think she was scared too, you know.”

“I know.” He hangs his head. “I didn’t — I just wanted her to listen.”

“No, I mean, before. That’s why she fought with you at all.” She brushes back his hair and he looks up at her. “She was afraid. We’re all afraid, Ben. Me and Finn and Rose and Poe and your parents and your students and everyone.”

“You are?” They never seem afraid, her least of all. She seems beautiful and fearless; Judith with a smile and a stolen sword.

“You should come out in the street with us, Ben.” 

“I will. If you want me to, I will.”

“It doesn’t feel like being nobody, I promise. It doesn’t feel like Poe’s in charge.” She takes his hand and weaves her fingers through his. “It feels like power. You see?”

He looks from her hand, small and cool and locked with his, to her face, blotchy and wet and smiling. He does not feel afraid, and when she leans forward to kiss him, it’s at the same moment he is leaning forward to kiss her.

She tastes like salt, and ginger, and her mouth is so small; he tries to disguise the desperation with which he kisses her, but she’s bold and hungry, so there’s no point in trying to play it cool. Kissing her ear, he inhales the sweet hot smell of her, and thinks of the small, spiced cookies an Iraqi student brought him once. He’d been brusque with the student, so he wouldn’t be caught crying over the gift. Rey’s tongue scrapes over the stubble below his jaw, and his blood heats. He pushes the robe away from her neck so he can hold her naked shoulders and feel the muscles in her back shift under his fingers, follow the line of her collarbone with his thumbs. He wants to take the robe off her entirely, absorb her nakedness and show her his. But he can hear footsteps in the hall.

“Rey?” he father’s voice calls. “You haven’t smothered him with a pillow, have you? Not that I don’t sympathize, but — ”

“I’ll be out in a minute, Dad.” They’re used to it, his crying himself hoarse in his room; the roughness of his voice won’t be any surprise. When the footsteps retreat, he keeps hold of Rey, and kisses her neck. “Let me take you home?”

She nods without hesitation, which surprises him, but makes it easier to climb to his feet, and offer her tissues.

He tries, and sort of succeeds, in not looking Danny dead in the eyes as he announces, “Rey wants to go home, so I’m taking her.” _So there._

Poe, Finn, and Han all look surprised, but Rose just narrows her eyes and tilts her head, and his mother looks completely unfazed. “Rey, sweetheart, feel free to take the box of samosas from the kitchen.” And Rey thanks her so effusively, and looks so delighted, that he can’t bring himself to remark on how bland they are.

Her shoes make little _squoosh_ sounds on the floor of the hall. “I can carry you, if you want.” He would. But she smiles and walks faster.

On the train, his heart is beating fast. He’s aware it’s a dumb thing to say, even as he says it: “So you and Poe really aren’t… or did you used to…?”

She crinkles her forehead. “You know Poe is ace, right?”

“Ace at what?”

 _“Asexual._ He’s not interested in sexual relationships.”

“But he’s always flirting — and he always had a girlfriend in high school — _all_ the girlfriends — ”

“He’s biromantic. He writes Rose’s sister six-page love letters every week. I think she replies with like, four lines and a heart emoji, but the heart emoji makes him happy. You really didn’t know? He has the ace flag in his Twitter header.”

Ben is dazedly sifting through this revelation when he sees her shiver. He wraps his arm around her, and then, when she burrows close to him, covers her wet hair with his chin. 

She leads him through the dark chaos of the apartment she shares. He’d offered to take her to his place, but she’d insisted on hers. It smells like poverty and coffee and her. He wants her to be happy. He wants her to be happy so badly. Ideally, he will _make_ her happy. As she pulls him down on her bed in her plant-shadowed room, he can suddenly see an entirely different shape to his days, beyond courses and departmental meetings and office hours. They strip off her wet clothes together, and he can imagine doing this all the time, any time she wants. 

She unbuttons his shirt and her breath stutters a little as she runs her hands over his bare chest; she swears, quietly, and grinds against him a little, and he ducks down to examine the perfection of her little breasts. They’re pink as rosebuds, hard as thorns. He puts one between his lips and sucks. “Fuck, Ben,” she gaps, and claws at his shoulders. He thinks that means _keep going_ so he does. “Ben, your _mouth,_ your back, your _hair.”_

He has to smother a laugh against her soft skin, thinking of his poor rejected paper, and one of his cited sources, a folk song where a girl begs for a bridegroom. _Bring me, Papa, a black-haired scholar._ If she wants him, he’s all hers.

And she does seem to want him; when he climbs down the bed to get between her legs, she wriggles and sighs. And when he touches her, with his fingers and tongue, she’s wetter than she was in the doorway, fresh out of the rain. He will be precise; he will use what he has read about best practices for cunnilingus, but first he has to just rub his face in her, grind his mouth, and luxuriate in how sweet and slippery she is. “Fuck,” he groans, long and slow. “Fuck. You’re so wet. I want you to come all over my face.”

She grinds against his nose, whimpering, and he sets to work, fingers petting at the small, silky opening of her, tongue licking her in shorter and shorter strokes as he feels her tense and tighten. “Inside me,” she begs, “your fingers,” and when he does as she asks, he makes involuntary, sounds against her slick flesh; she’s so tight, he can feel her stretch. He wants to make her happy; he wants to make her come; he wants to do terrible, terrible things to the beautiful body she’s wrapping around him. 

When he gets his fingers in, just two fingers, and finds the spot to rub, she cries out. He inhales roughly. “You like that? That feel good?”

“Yes,” she gasps. “Fuck. Please. You open me up. Just. Oh fuck. Just like that.”

“You want me to open you up? Want me to work your pussy ‘til it can take my cock?”

“Yes. Yes, please.” Her hips roll, and when he tries to lick her clit again, she hurts his nose with how hard she grinds against him. “Work me over. Fuck me. Fuck me hard. Fuck me so hard I forget my name.”

It’s hard to breathe. He wants to be gentle with her, this girl who hates her nobody’s name. He wants to hold her down and make himself feel power on her body. He will find a way to do both.

He makes himself stay where he is, rubbing and growling filthy questions, until her back is arching, and then he gets up on his knees and presses his cock into her. When he thrusts, she screams between her teeth, and pulls at him. He lifts her hips in his hands, angles himself so his cock hits the soft place his fingers had stroked. He watches her face as best he can when he’s half out of his mind with the feeling of his cock inside her, greedy for the moment when her eyes squeeze shut and her squirming turns frenzied, and then she squeezes down on him, on his cock, and he has no mind left to see or hear anything, barely enough to keep fucking her, drawing himself forward and back through the heat of her, just, _just_ enough to gasp, “I’m going to — can I — ” and feel her pull him closer, down against her chest. He comes like he’s been waiting for it his whole life, for this one moment with one woman in a tiny Bronx apartment, and who knows? An aftershock passed through her, and shakes him. Maybe he has.

He’s still breathing like he’s run a marathon when she rolls him over and reaches over his chest. “I’m hungry,” she says. “Do you want a samosa?” And he remembers the other place in the Tanakh where milk and honey and figs all go together. _The green figs form on the fig tree… I have plucked my myrrh and spice, Eaten my honey and honeycomb, Drunk my wine and my milk._

“Song of Songs,” he mutters.

“What?” She’s picking one out of the box.

“Nothing. Just a citation.”

“For what?” Her mouth is full. She doesn’t look disappointed. She looks like she loves it.

He sighs, and kisses her back. “This,” he says, and kisses her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Kettubot and gittim** — Plural forms of "ketubah" and "gett." Marriage contracts, and bills of divorce issued by rabbinical courts.  
>  **Eretz Yisroel** — The Land of Israel, meaning, the territory delineated as the Promised Land in the Torah.  
>  **Seven species** — Seven kinds of food which Eretz Yisroel is supposed to produce: Wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and honey.  
>  **Early modern** — This how the cool academics say "Renaissance," I believe.  
>  **Halachic** — According to Jewish religious law.  
>  **Tanakh** — The Hebrew Bible. An acronym of Torah, Nevi'im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings).
> 
>  
> 
> The City College of New York, where Rey goes to school, is at 138th St in Manhattan. Leah's apartment would be about fifty blocks south, meaning Rey's walked for an hour in the rain.
> 
> Ben would win his $20 bet; Han's zucchini thing [ does come from Smitten Kitchen](https://smittenkitchen.com/2007/08/quick-zucchini-saute/) though Han would argue that Deb Perelman seems like a nice, smart young lady and he's sure she _would_ be an anarchist if he could just talk to her for a bit.
> 
> If you're not familiar with the story of Judith: With her city under siege, Judith puts on her finest clothing and jewels, and takes a basket full of wine, milk, and cheese to the enemy camp. She lets the enemy believe she is looking to guarantee her personal safety by seducing the general; she feeds him everything in the basket while making sweet conversation, and then, when he passes out, she cuts his head off with his own sword, puts the head in the basket, and returns to her city. It is not considered a biblical story, but is in somewhat-recent tradition retold around Chanukah. Ben could tell you all about its sources, its canonicity, and its uses in art and allegory.
> 
> Ben's folk song is real, and contains the title of his paper, but I've misplaced the book in which I read about it so you will just have to take my word.


End file.
